On verbal duplication in River Plate Spanish

This paper focuses on the morphosyntax of a kind of verbal duplication attested in River Plate Spanish (e.g. Vení acá, vení Lit: ‘come here come’). One striking property of this construction is that it requires that the duplicated verbs not be adjacent. I show that verbal duplication in River Plate Spanish instantiates a case of head copy realization and that the observed anti-adjacency effect reflects an underlying condition on non-pronunciation of heads in general. Some cases of head copy realization under apparent adjacency are independently accounted for once parts of words cannot be subject to morphological ellipsis.