“Move vs. Agree”: The case of clitic doubling
“Move vs. Agree”: The case of clitic doubling

Summary/Abstract: This paper continues the long-standing discussion whether clitics in clitic doubling constructions should be regarded as being similar to affixes expressing subject-verb agreement or rather as reflexes of movement. A crosslinguistic comparison of clitics will show that although clitics come in different flavors either as phi-features or as determiners, they are all the result of an overt feature movement to repair violations of the Minimal Link Constraint (Anagnostopoulou 2005). Long Distance Agree constructions in Greek, Romanian and Spanish use clitic doubling as a strategy to avoid minimality effects. On the basis of a parallel between clitic doubling and Long Distance Agree, I conclude that they are the outcome of two different operations Move vs. Agree but both are sensitive to Minimal Link Constraint and are regulated by a phase-based locality condition (the Phase Impenetrability Condition).

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