Clitic doubling and DOM in Spanish: A diachronic account

Clitic Doubling is the linguistic phenomenon in which a clause contains both a clitic pronoun and a nominal or prepositional phrase, which refer to the same referent and have the same syntactic function. In this paper, we will only be concerned with postposed objects as in (1). (1) ¿Quién le dijo a ella que el aseo y compostura que gastaba no eran suficientes? (Pardo Bazán, Emilia 1883. La Coruña, España) ´Who told her that the neatness and composure that she had were not enough?´ Linguistic researchers have been trying to find out the motivation for the appearance and expansion of CD, a phenomenon which seems to go against all the rules of linguistic economy. One line of research views the expansion of CD as a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with the expansion of DOM (Cfr. Melis and Flores 2009). There is DOM with Direct Objects (DO) in Spanish when salient human DOs are marked by means of the preposition a ‘to’, whereas non-human DOs usually show up without a prepositional marker. As the preposition a is an obligatory grammatical marker of Indirect Objects (OIs), Melis and Flores (2009) claim that DOM affected the marking of IOs, which lost their monopoly on prepositional case marking. They argue that CD is a compensation strategy for this loss, i.e. a new way of disambiguating IOs from DOs. Melis and Flores (2009) convincingly show that th