THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPANISH INDIRECT OBJECT DUPLICATE CONSTRUCTIONS

The indirect object duplicate constructions of Spanish have posed many problems for specialists of Spanish syntactic analysis. No satisfactory explanation for their genesis, development, and continued existence has been adduced. It became clear to me that only a diachronic analysis of these structures would satisfactorily furnish an explanation.;What could not be seen from a synchronic perspective was revealed from historical analysis. Synchronically, the duplicate constructions are analyzable as the addition of the tonic pronoun phrase to the indispensable atonic pronoun. But, diachronically, the atonic, was in fact added to the tonic pronoun phrase to reinforce the emphatic character of the latter. After centuries of co-occurrence, and the grammaticalization or cliticization of the atonic, a cephalic shift ensued. The originally additional atonic became basic at the same time the originally basic tonic element became the additional expansion.;Analogous structures are found in other dialects of the Romance diasystem, and in languages outside the Romance and Indo-European language families. Therefore, because of the commonality of object duplication discovered in this investigation, it was deemed unnecessary to attribute directly this phenomenon in Spanish to contact with adstrate languages such as Basque, Celtic, and Arabic.;This study demonstrates the importance of considering historical data and the role of semantic and pragmatic factors in syntactic change in general; it also offers to the specialist of Spanish some solutions to the issues related to the topic of indirect object duplication such as: (1) which is the basic element of these constructions? (2) the role of lefsmo and lafsmo, (3) the role of adstrate languages, (4) direct object duplication, (5) grammaticalization of the atonic pronoun and object agreement, (6) the eventual preverbal positioning of atonic pronouns with finite verbs, and (7) changes in word order tendencies and the role of emphatic speech.;Another methodological problem of previous studies has been the limited scope of the analyses. None has gone beyond the sentence. I found it necessary to examine the surrounding context of these duplicate constructions, in addition to the constructions themselves, in order to understand better the function they served throughout their development.