In Spanish and many related languages, pronominal cliticization has
characteristics of
A-movement: it feeds binding and licenses depictives (Demonte 1987;
Pylkk¨anen 2002; Anagnostopoulou 2003). Based on new data from 12 speakers,
we investigate the fact that in Iberian Spanish spoken in rural Valladolid,
such cliticization also has an A-bar property—the ability to license
parasitic gaps (PGs). We argue that in Spanish such cliticization is a
composite A/A'-movement, which has traits of both movement types (Coon &
Bale 2014; Van Urk 2015; Erlewine 2018, a.o.) We also contrast “bare”
clitics with doubled clitics, which only have A-properties (Di Tullio et
al. 2019). We go on to show that PG-licensing by Spanish clitics mirrors
intricate PG facts from English observed by Nissenbaum (2000), thus adding
cross-linguistic support to Nissenbaum’s syntactic/semantic theory about
why such patterns emerge.
