Clitic doubling and differential object marking

Abstract

This work follows the progression of a grammatical construction that unifies the Romanian accusative preposition pe with a coreferential pronominal clitic, together forming the cd-pe construction. On the basis of historical texts, it is argued that these two grammatical phenomena evolved into a clause-level construction with a dedicated semantics and pragmatics in the modern language. A corpus analysis illustrates how cd-pe won out against a competitor pe-only construction that persisted until as recently as the early 20th century, and which is still retained in some dialects and registers. The broader scope is to refocus the discussion of clitic doubling on pragmatic motivators in light of diachronic constructionalization processes, and to reflect on the nature of similar clitic doubling phenomena evident in other Romance languages in terms of the entrenchment of language-specific constructionalization processes.