A Lexical Functional Grammar Account of Spanish Weak Dative Pronominals

This thesis is concerned with Spanish weak dative pronominals. Similar elements-generally labelled as clitics- in many languages have been focus of much research in Linguistics. The present study, however, abstracts away from classic approaches that had the external form of clitics as their main focus and provides description and analysis of very specific uses of dative pronominal items, namely when they appear on ditransitive constructions, with psychological predicates or in a configuration where they are not lexically specified in the valency of the verb, the so-called non-selected datives. The analysis of the dative in ditransitive constructions is twofold. We claim that the distribution of the dative in such configurations has semantic and syntactic implications. The presence of the dative pronoun is becoming grammaticalised and provides an entailment of affectedness. In instances of clitic doubling where we have both the pronoun and a noun phrase, we are treating the pronoun as the element that the predicate subcategorises for and the noun phrase is linked to it through information structure. This analysis is quite innovative as it ensures both elements are linked but they retain syntactic independence, in contrast with their treatment in previous approaches. With psychological predicates, we are concerned with what the status of the dative marked argument is; as previous approaches have contradictory views of it as subject or object. We analyse this dative with the tools provided by Lexical Mapping Theory and disagree with previous accounts by proposing an analysis of this dative as OBJɵ. With regards to non-selected datives in Spanish, they have not been widely discussed in the literature. We describe the different types and propose a finer grouping based on their ability to be treated as derived arguments. We sketch an analysis that adds a dative argument to the valency of a predicate through a lexical operation.