Abstract
This dissertation provides an eclectic linguistic account of the phenomenon of null objects in Basque Spanish and two other related phenomena that are pervasive in the same variety, namely, leismo and clitic doubling. Their syntactic distribution and coreference relations reveal that null objects are pros that behave similarly to the pro categories licensed by overt object clitics. Furthermore, this investigation puts forward a crucial complementariness between the semantic composition of NPs that can occur as null objects and that of NPs that can be clitic doubled. Incidentally, clitic doubling in Basque Spanish only takes place with the leista clitic system. These facts strongly suggest that the three phenomena are different manifestations of one single verb-object agreement relation. This insight is developed under the light of the Agreement Hypothesis and it is claimed that, for inanimate entities, the object drop parameter is instantiated by default null clitic agreement morphology, whereas the remaining third person object-verb agreement is done via the LE-forms.
Chapter one outlines some of the core assumptions from different theoretical frameworks and their relevance to this study.
In chapter two I define the term Basque Spanish and describe the methododolgy and criteria followed to select the speakers and collect the data.
Chapter three deals with the syntactic categorization of null objects within the Principles and Parameters framework, and presents an implicational scale of sentence acceptability/likelihood of production in terms of the semantics of the null object referents and the lexical and grammatical instantiations of the feature [change] on the verb.
Chapter four analyzes the conditions on leismo and clitic doubling and subsequently subsumes the proposals given for the three phenomena under a single unifying analysis, i.e. the diverse realization of verb-object agreement.
Chapter five explores the Basque Influence Hypothesis. It is shown that if Basque exerted any influence on the diffusion of null objects in Basque Spanish that influence could only be indirect, that is, a relaxation of restrictions operating on a null object structure already existing in all Spanish varieties.
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