Specificity effects with clitic doubling and pe marking

Abstract

This paper focuses on the relationship between pe marking and clitic doubling in Romanian arguing in favour of Bleam’s (1999) hypothesis: the two mechanisms are semantically related through the specificity effects they both engender, but are otherwise independent one from the other. Diachronic data support this hypothesis. Another point which supports this hypothesis is that pe marking may be used in some contexts in which clitic doubling is not allowed (bare quantifiers). Furthermore, pe marking is not as consistent as clitic doubling when putting forth specificity effects. As to the way in which specificity effects arise we have identified different mechanisms: in the case of clitic doubling, the clitic pronoun acts as a restrictor on the domain variable of the DP it doubles, while in the case of pe marking, the specific interpretation is taken to be the effect of a certain interpretation procedure triggered by the insertion of pe (a semantic type shifter).

Keywords

• specificity
• clitic doubling
• differential object marking