Clitic doubling in Brazilian Portuguese as a DOM strategy

Abstract

This article shows that clitic doubling in Brazilian Portuguese is possible if the direct and indirect objects correspond to a first or a second person pronoun. We posit that the clitics are required whenever the doubled object carries a familiar [topic] feature, whose presence depends on the semantic properties of the nominal item. We postulate that the clitics are merged in the head Do to value the uninterpretable φ-feature of the head Do and the uninterpretable topic feature of the object. This proposal entails that there is a transfer of the topic feature from Ko to Do, which explains why the clitic is spelled out on the head of DP. We claim that the phenomenon of clitic doubling can be viewed as a side effect of differential object marking. This mechanism contrasts with typical DOM in Romance languages in the sense that it does not licence a preposition in a prenominal position.