To the Right of the Verb: An Investigation of Clitic Doubling and Right Dislocation in three Spanish Dialects - Tapa dura

"Valeria Belloro's monograph is an essential contribution to understanding the construction of clitic doubling and the conditions that govern its use in various different forms of spoken Spanish. Aimed at lecturers in linguistics, and especially those who work in syntax, semantics and pragmatics, this book is a meticulous exploration of the anaphora between accusative and dative clitics and non-personal pronoun lexical objects. [...] In little more than 150 pages and with over 100 examples, this work condenses and links a complex (but absolutely necessary) theoretical argument in a masterful way with carefully analysed and described empirical data. The result is an indispensable work and an essential reference for scholars of language work, which show that syntax, semantics, pragmatics and cognition all serve speakers' communicative exchanges."Sara Gomez SeibaneUniversidad de la RiojaRevista de Filologia Espanola, 96 (2016)"To the Right of the Verb has the potential to be of interest to linguists of various persuasions. The way in which it integrates theoretical perspectives with the corpus of the subject in question is certainly exemplary, highlighting points of contact to combine both novel and traditional approaches. For this reason, and maybe more relevantly for those who study other phenomena and/or other languages, it can also be read as a proposed research methodology that bridges the perhaps too pronounced gap between functionalism and formalism. Although this is a frequent appeal from various areas of the discipline nowadays, it is rare to find concrete research that puts it so clearly, systematically and - above all - successfully into practice. A book with such characteristics is always good news."Martin CalifaSigno y Sena, 30:2 (2016)"The fact that a specalised work in Spanish, on a very particular syntactic phenomenon, has gone beyond borders and has been published in a research context outside of the Hispanic world invites us to think that the results are relevant for linguistic research in a more universal, typological sense."Valeria Benitez RoseteUniversidad Nacional Autonoma de MexicoEstudios de Linguistica Aplicada, 64 (2016)"To the Right of the Verb is a sound contribution to the literature on Spanish clitic doubling and right dislocation, primarily because it draws on data from various dialects to shed light on the phenomenon and resolve, or at least explain, previous contradictory findings. Because of its emphasis on the speaker's cognitive representation of discourse during language production, this study is part of the functionalist literature; within this broader framework, the choice to use RRG to express the theory is coherent because of the shared focus on cognitive processes and the belief that discourse is central to language production."Glen Heinrich-WallaceUniversity of California DavisHispania, 100 (2017)

This book provides a new approach to the study of clitic doubling in Spanish, based on spontaneous data considered within their broad discourse context, and focusing on the cognitive and pragmatic factors that underpin the use of these constructions. Considering examples from Argentine, Mexican and Spanish regional variants of the language, the study embraces the graduality and heterogeneity that emerge from the data, and distinguishes different subtypes of "doubling" depending on the pragmatic constraints that govern their use, as well as the morphophonological and morphosyntactic characteristics of dative and accusative clitics in each variant. Each "doubling" subtype, in turn, is shown to have different degrees of spreading. The book concludes with an examination of these constructions within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar. The formalizations proposed account for the complex interplay of syntax, semantics and pragmatics evidenced by clitic doubling in a way that, at the same time, is consistent with the diversity uncovered by the analysis of the natural data.