A biclausal account of Clitic Left-Dislocations with epithets in Rioplatense Spanish

Clitic Left-Dislocations with Epithets in Rioplatense Spanish (CLLD+ep) are sentences with three apparently co-referential direct object constituents: a clitic-left-dislocated topic DP (DP-LD), a clitic (CL) and a post-verbal epithet (DP-ep). Previous studies have proposed that the DP-ep is licensed in-situ as Clitic Doubling and the DP-LD base-generated, or that the DP-ep and the DP-LD are licensed together in a predicative small clause doubled by the clitic. However, data where the DP-LD and the CL are singular but co-occur with a plural DP-ep cast doubt on previous analyses. Here, I explore an analysis of CLLD+ep as an underlyingly biclausal structure subject to deletions. The biclausal structure allows a plural epithet to refer to the plural restrictor set of a syntactically singular quantifier in a previous clause.


Introduction
Clitic Left-Dislocations with Epithets in Rioplatense Spanish (CLLD+ep; 1) are transitive sentences with a clitic-left-dislocated topic DP (DP-LD), a clitic (CL) and a post-verbal epithet (DP-ep). 1 (1) a. Suñer (2006: 129) A Menem dp-ld , nadie lo cl votará a ese estafador a Menem.m.sg nobody cl.m.sg vote.fut.3sg a that swindler sinvergüenza dp-ep . shameless.m.sg '(Carlos) Menem, nobody will vote for that shameless swindler.' b. A los políticos dp-ld los cl odio a los idiotas dp-ep . a the politicians.m.pl cl.m.pl hate.1sg a the idiots.m.pl 'I hate politicians, those idiots.' All three components are identifiable as direct objects. The object CL is accusative. 2 Both DPs appear with a iff they are animate ("personal a", glossed a, an instance of Differential (2) a. Suñer (2006: 129) En el trabajo, a su hermano Mara me dijo que no in the work a his brother.m.sg Mara me tell.pst.3sg that no lo aguantan a ese tarugo. cl.m.sg stand.3pl a that jackass.m.sg 'Mara told me that they can't stand her idiot brother at work.' b. López (2009: 230) En el trabajo, Mara me dijo que no lo aguantan [ sc in the work Mara me tell.pst.3sg that no cl.m.sg stand.3pl ese tarugo dp-ep su hermano dp-ld ]. that jackass.m.sg his brother.m.sg Whereas this proposal successfully accounts for the predication relation and the agreement between the DPs, López recognized that special stipulations would need to be added to account for DOM of the DP-ep, since predicative DPs in Spanish copular and small clauses appear without a. 4 3 I restrict the discussion to animates following Suñer and López, although inanimate DOs are also acceptable: (i) La moto la vendí esa porquería. The motorcycle.f.sg cl.f.sg sell.pst.1sg that junk.f.sg 'I sold the motorcycle, that piece of junk.' 4 Moreover, indefinites can be predicates in small clauses, but they cannot occur in CLLD+ep, a fact not easily accommodated in López's account.

Forced agreement mismatches in Clitic Left-Dislocations with epithets
Even though both accounts have merits, the data I present below are not easily accommodated by either proposal. Example (3) shows a DP-LD that is a negative indefinite quantifier, morphosyntactically singular. In this case, the CL agrees in the singular with the DP-LD. However, the DP-ep is plural, creating a number agreement mismatch between the components. Moreover, as (3b) and (3c) show, it is not possible for the CL to agree in the plural with the DP-ep, or for the DP-ep to be singular, thus agreeing across the board. That is, the number mismatch is obligatory. 5 (3) a. Estigarribia ( Estigarribia (2017). One may also find gender mismatches with epicene nouns in CLLD+ep (iv). However, these mismatches are not relevant here because lack of overt agreement is a property of epicene nouns independently of CLLD+ep (see, for example, a copular sentence such as (v)). Careful consideration of the semantics of the predication relation in CLLD+ep also argues against a small clause analysis. Note that in (3a) (repeated below for convenience) the DP-ep is not predicated of the overt (singular) DP-LD, but of the covert (plural) restriction set of the quantifier, 'the students' (that is, it is the students who are lucky, not 'no student' o 'some student').
(3) a. A ningún estudiante lo bocharon a los suertudos. a no.one student.m.sg cl.m.sg fail.pst.3pl a the lucky.m.pl 'But no student was failed, the lucky dogs.' Trying to license (3a) with López's mechanism is also problematic. The possibilities in (6) match the surface DPs, but their small clause is ungrammatical and would make ningún estudiante the subject of predication.
No lo/los bocharon *[ sc unos/los suertudos no cl.m.sg/cl.m.pl fail.pst.3pl some/the lucky.m.pl ningún estudiante] no.one student.m.sg ('The students weren't failed, the lucky bastards.') These mismatch data force us to continue looking for a viable licensing mechanism for CLLD+ep.

Agreement mismatches in Intersentential Anaphora
Notably, number mismatches like these are also found in Intersentential Anaphora. Such mismatches are familiar from studies of the reference of they across sentences in English (7a shows the pronoun they; 7b a plural epithet). Similar examples can be constructed for Spanish (8).
(7) a. No professor was harmed in the making of this paper. They (=the professors) were well protected. b. No professor was harmed in the making of this paper. The poor things (=the professors) are so sensitive.
(8) a. No bocharon a ningún estudiante. *pro sg Había no fail.pst.3pl a no.one student.m.sg have.pst.3sg estudiado mucho. studied much 'They did not fail any student. *S/he had studied a lot.' b. No bocharon a ningún estudiante. pro pl Habían no fail.pst.3pl a no.one student.m.sg have.pst.3pl estudiado mucho. studied much 'They did not fail any student. They had studied a lot.' c. No bocharon a ningún estudiante. *pro sg Es un suertudo. no fail.pst.3pl a no.one student.m.sg be.3sg a lucky.m.sg 'They did not fail any student. *He is lucky.' d. No bocharon a ningún estudiante.
pro pl Son unos suertudos. no fail.pst.3pl a no.one student.m.sg be.3pl some lucky.pl 'They did not fail any student. They are lucky.' The configuration of intersentential anaphoric relations allows a plural pronoun (or epithet) to refer to the plural (covert) restriction of a singular (overt) quantified antecedent. Note that in (7), not only do they/the poor things take a plural antecedent that is not itself overtly present in the preceding sentence, but also were well protected/are so sensitive are predicated of 'professors', that is, of the restriction of the quantified no professor. This reference to the restrictor set is often called maximal set anaphora (Nouwen 2003: 43), and is generally available in intersentential contexts, provided the restrictor set is guaranteed to be non-empty (that is, with strong determiners; see Nouwen 2003: 50). Likewise, both in (3a) and in (8) habían estudiado mucho/suertudos are predicated of 'estudiantes', the restriction of the quantified ningún estudiante. Therefore, the singular/plural mismatches occur similarly in Intersentential Anaphora and in CLLD+ep.
In light of these parallels, I propose that number mismatches can be explained if CLLD+ep is derived from a structure that is underlyingly biclausal, allowing for anaphoric relations where a subsequent plural epithet can refer to the plural maximal set (restriction) of the singular quantified antecedent. Biclausal structures have been assumed in analyses of dislocations (Ott 2014;Ott & de Vries 2016), ellipsis (Arregi 2010), emphatic replies (Poletto & Zanuttini 2013), and clefts (Zubizarreta 2014). The two underlying clauses involved are reformulations that support deletion of identical parts and phonological integration, thus deriving a CLLD+ep that is monoclausal on the surface.

Putting forward a biclausal solution
Let us assume for simplicity the CLLD+ep in (9a). The underlying structure in (9b) is composed of a CP1 with a VP that contains the DP-LD, and a CP2 with a VP that contains the DP-ep. In (9c), Clitic-Left Dislocation applies in CP1 for information-structural reasons (this is independently needed to obtain a CLLD sentence). In (9d), Bare Argument Ellipsis (or Gapping, more generally, since more than one constituent can remain; see (16) below) deletes the redundant odio in CP2, leaving the epithet as remnant. 6 (9) a. A Pepe lo odio al idiota. a Pepe cl.m.sg hate.1sg a.the idiot.m.sg 'I hate that idiot Pepe.' b. [ CP1 odio a Pepe dp-ldi ] [ CP2 odio al idiota dp-epi ] c. [ CP1 a Pepe dp-ldi lo odio a Pepe dp-ldi ] [ CP2 odio al idiota dp-epi ] d. [ CP1 a Pepe dp-ldi lo odio a Pepe dp-ldi ] [ CP2 odio al idiota dp-epi ] In the underlying structure in (9b), CP1 and CP2 are reformulations in the sense of Ott (2016), that is, the CP2 is fully redundant with the CP1 modulo the differing DPs. In this case, ellipsis allows a CP2 remnant to be integrated prosodically in the CP1. Hence, the reformulative character of CP2 allows the DP-ep to be within the scope of the Nuclear Stress Rule.
Because my proposal depends on the underlying structures being syntactically parallel, I assume that CLLD in CP1 is obtained by movement. Evidence in support of this is the fact that a lower quantified DP can bind DP-LDs (10) (see Villa-García 2019). Another supporting fact is that a prosodic boundary is not necessarily present after the DP-LD (Labastía 2018), which would otherwise suggest base-generation. 7 (10) A su i mujer todo marido i la engaña a la muy a his wife every husband cl.f.sg cheat.on.3sg a the very desgraciada. unfortunate.f.sg 'Every husband cheats on his poor unfortunate wife.' Let us see now how this proposal accounts for all known properties of CLLD+ep.

Morphosyntactic marking of CLLD+ep components
Further evidence for an analysis that assumes a biclausal structure followed by ellipsis is provided by case matching of the DP-ep, not predicted by López's account. The biclausal structure in (9) correctly predicts that the DP-ep will be a-marked and have the morphosyntactic shape of an argumental DP, because the DP-ep is a local argument of the V in CP2. This strongly suggests that there must be additional covert clausal structure than can license the visible epithet. 8 On the other hand, connectivity and agreement effects between the DP-LD and the CL follow directly from properties of "vanilla" Clitic Left-Dislocation in CP1. 9 Note that, as a result, (a) Clitic Doubling is not a mechanism that licenses CLLD+ep or parts thereof (contra Suñer 2006), and thus (b) the CL must agree with the DP-LD but is theoretically free to disagree with the DP-ep. Crucially, so far nothing enforces agreement of the DP-ep with either of the other two components, a fact that will become immediately relevant in 5.3 below.

Predicational semantics
How the epithet enters a predication relation with the intended, but not always overt, subject of predication is not obvious in Suñer's and López's proposal. In the account advanced here no specific predication structure (small clause or other) is needed. Instead, the DP-ep enters in a predication simply because of how reference to entities works in chained discourse. Generally, subsequent reference to a given discourse participant x with a new referential expression with lexical content P is tantamount, semantically, to predicating P(x). For example, the speaker of (11) below cannot really deny having called Pete 'a son of a bitch', or in (12), deny having called Pepe 'an idiot'. A biclausal structure allows the predication idiota(Pepe) to be established in the same way for (9) above. 10 (11) I hate Pete. The son of a bitch slept with my wife.  Rizzi (1997) for an explanation of why the CL is obligatory in CLLD. 10 In a similar vein, Ott (2014;2016) argues that coreference between anchor and restrictive nominal appositive, and in left-dislocations, is obtained from discourse coherence. I agree. The CP2 cannot explicitly encode the predication relation, as in (vi) below, because if (vi) was the underlying structure, it is unclear how the DP-ep would end up spelled out as (viii) due to the morphosyntactic mismatch in definiteness (the same problem afflicts López's analysis). Notably, the predication idiota(Pepe) is not-at-issue (see Estigarribia 2017): it is not part of the main assertion and is typically not amenable to direct rejection. This is expected if the predication is established in the absence of an intraclausal syntactic predicational structure (although this is not the only way not-at-issue content can arise).

Number agreement mismatches
Finally, the key datum in this squib is forced number agreement mismatches between singular DP-LD and CL on one hand, and plural DP-ep on the other. As we saw above, plural pronouns in Intersentential Anaphora can refer to the reference set of a previous quantifier (13a) or to its restriction or maximal set (13b). Consequently, I identify (3a) (repeated here for convenience) as an instance of maximal set anaphora (maximal because it refers to the whole restrictor set).
(13) Nouwen (2003: 43) a. Few MPs attended the meeting. They decided not to discuss anything important. b. Few MPs attended the meeting. But they all attended the drinks afterwards.
(3) a. A ningún estudiante lo bocharon a los suertudos. a no.one student.m.sg cl.m.sg fail.pst.3pl a the lucky.m.pl 'No student was failed, the lucky dogs.' (14). In (14b), the topical object DP in CP1 is fronted to check information structure features: the DP-LD thus surfaces case-marked as in its base position and agrees with the clitic. 11 Redundant material in CP2 is then deleted. Prosodic integration is possible as mentioned above as a consequence of the reformulative character of CP2. 12 Going back to the beginning of this squib, Suñer claimed the epithet to be in-situ on prosodic grounds. In support of the DP-ep's being in-situ, Estigarribia (2014;2017) shows that this constituent also precedes secondary predicates (15a), VP-internal adverbials (15b), and is licensed in ECM contexts (15c).

I propose that (3a) is licensed biclausally as in
(15) a. A mi vecina yo no la considero a esa yegua una a my neighbor.f.sg I no cl.f.sg consider.1sg a that mare.f.sg a amiga. friend.f.sg 'My neighbor, I don't consider that bitch a friend.' b. A Mara la atropellaron a la pobre a propósito. a Mara.f.sg cl.f.sg run.over.pst.3pl a the poor.f.sg on purpose 'They ran Mara over on purpose, the poor sod.' c. A los alumnos los dejo a los tarambanas a the students.m.pl cl.m.pl leave.1sg a the scatterbrains.m.pl copiarse. to.copy 'The students, I let those scatterbrains copy off of someone else.' This behavior is predicted in this analysis. For example, occurrence of the DP-ep before a secondary predicate is derived by ellipsis targeting redundant material both in CP2 and CP1 (that is, backward clausal ellipsis, see Ott 2014), yielding the derivation in (16). 13 This way, the DP2 shows in-situ behavior while belonging to a separate clause underlyingly. The DP-ep can also occur after a secondary predicate. In this case, backward clausal ellipsis is not applied, but forward ellipsis of the secondary predicate in CP2 (17) Ningún is not the only quantifier that allows the DP-ep to refer to its restriction. The DP-LD quantifier in (18) is pocos 'few'. There is no number mismatch because the reference set for the quantifier is plural, making the clitic plural as well, independently of the plurality of the DP-ep (indices added to clarify this).

(18)
A pocos corruptos i los i condenan a los hijos de puta j . a few corrupt.pl cl.m.pl sentence.3pl a the sons of bitch.m.pl 'Few corrupt politicians are sentenced, the bastards (=all corrupt politicians).' In order to derive (18), surface pocos 'few' must be many plus VP negation underlyingly, as argued for in Greer (2014a;b). This explains why the pattern in (19) is only possible when pocos has the proportional reading 'few of the corrupt (politicians) are sentenced', which is equivalent to many + NOT VP, and not when it has the "reverse" reading 'few of the sentenced people are corrupt (politicians)', which is not equivalent to many + NOT VP.

Conclusion and further work
To summarize, a biclausal analysis accounts for the morphological shape of all the components, their surface positions, and the way the DP-ep finds a subject of predication in either the reference or the restrictor set of the DP-LD. Key components of this proposal are that CLLD is derived by movement in CP1, that both forward and backward ellipsis must be allowed to apply, and that the CP2 epithet must be allowed to integrate prosodically into the CP1. Yet, a couple of observations suggest the link between Intersentential Anaphora and CLLD+ep is not unproblematic. First, since Intersentential Anaphora involving non-epithet DPs is acceptable (20a), we should expect non-epithet DPs to occur in CLLD+ep (20b) One possibility worth exploring is to follow Suñer in exploiting Condition C of classical Binding Theory. For that, we need to assume that in CLLD+ep there is, in fact, some mechanism that syntactically integrates the DP-ep into the CP1, and that this full syntactic integration is responsible for this restriction. Biclausal analyses of fragment answers and sluicing (Merchant 2004), split questions, and right-and left-dislocations (Arregi 2010;Ott 2014;Ott & de Vries 2016) yield structures where the remnants of ellipsis are not fully integrated in the host clause. Contrary to this, CLLD+ep is monoclausal on the surface. Allowing full syntactic integration of the DP-ep would make it subject to Condition C, thus preventing R-expressions from occurring. This would require making the deletion site in CP1 available for this kind of "extreme" merging. For example, this could be a kind of external remerge à la de Vries (2012). But, prima facie, it looks like this solution risks overgenerating in a different way, since now all traces of movement could in principle be vacated to allow remergings. 14 Note that the weight/length of the DP-ep is not an issue: (ix) A Méndez no lo voté al hijo de una caravana de diez mil a Méndez no cl.m.sg vote.pst.1sg a.the son of a caravan of ten thousand putas. whores.m.sg 'I didn't vote for Méndez, the son of a caravan of a thousand whores.' 15 A reviewer mentions that (20b) does not sound too bad. If so, then that is even better for the biclausal account, since the intersentential version is OK.
Therefore, I believe the issue in (22) is how to satisfy the expectations that the use of cada sets up. This is not a problem in Intersentential Anaphora because the first sentence's interpretation is unproblematically distributive, and the quantifier cada still introduces its restriction set as a possible antecedent for future reference.
To resolve the issues raised in this squib satisfactorily, it is crucial to determine experimentally, in future work, the range of grammatical quantifier/DP-ep combinations and their degree of acceptability. This will help narrow down the possible analyses of Romance Clitic Left-Dislocations. Moreover, if the analysis presented here is correct, it can have important consequences for recent proposals about "unconventional" merging operations, and more generally for the infrastructure of the syntax-semantics interface.