Redobro de clítico em português europeu

This paper investigates the clitic doubling (CD) construction in European Portuguese (EP), in which a single argument is expressed by a clitic and a strong pronoun. In EP, CD mandatorily occurs in discourse and syntactic contexts where a pronominal object must be stressed or conjoined. The highly restrictive pattern of CD in EP distinguishes this language from other Romance languages, such as Spanish and Romanian, where a clitic may optionally double full nominal expressions. This paper aims to explain the observed contrast between CD in EP and other languages arguing that the descriptive term ‘clitic doubling’ covers two different constructions. More specifically, it is claimed herein that in EP the clitic is not an element doubling an argument, as is traditionally assumed in the CD analyses for other languages, but the doubled argument itself. The current paper proposes that in EP the clitic is related to the strong pronoun via syntactic movement and the doubling configuration results from the spell-out of both copies of the movement chain in order to satisfy a PF requirement concerning stress assignment. CD in EP is, thus, an interface phenomenon involving two independently motivated operations: on the one hand, the syntactic movement of the clitic to attach to a verbal host, and, on the other hand, the realisation of a strong pronoun in PF to receive prosodic stress.