La interfaz sintaxis-pragmática: Caída de objeto acusativo definido sin clítico en el español rioplatense

Abstract

As is well-known, Spanish allows implicit subjects and objects. Subjects are identified by the agreement morphology on the verb, definite accusative objects by the clitic lo, and dative objects by the clitic le. It has also been established that Spanish allows unidentified indefinite object drop. Although the usual assumption is that Spanish generally disallows cliticless definite object drop, Quiteño Spanish constitutes a noteworthy exception, as Suñer and Yépez (1989) demonstrate. This paper examines unidentified definite object drop (UDOD) in yet another dialect of Spanish, viz., River Plate (RP, spoken in and around Buenos Aires, Argentina, and parts of Uruguay), a phenomenon which, as far as can be ascertained, has gone unnoticed up till now, as (1) and (2) illustrate: (1) ¿Retiro, señor? Take-away, sir? “Shall I take this away?” (e.g. the tray) (2) ¿Quiere que le guarde? Want-3PSG that CL-DAT put-1PSG “Would you like me to put it away for you?” (e.g. the suitcase) We propose that by and large, these instances of UDOD can be analyzed along the same lines as their counterparts in topic-oriented languages such as Chinese, for which the standard account is that the empty category is a variable bound by an operator, strongly bound, in turn, by a topic. However, as we shall demonstrate, UDOD in RP Spanish is subject to heavy pragmatic restrictions. Thus, the entity being referred to must be salient in the immediate context of utterance, presupposed or prototypical, and, crucially, anchored to speech time, i.e., it must be deictic, so that it cannot be an entity in the larger universe of discourse.