LA INACUSATIVIDAD Y LA ALTERNANCIA CAUSATIVA. EL CASO DE LOS CLÍTICOS MARGINALES EN EL ESPAÑOL RIOPLATENSE.

The following paper analyses the marginal clitic la in unaccusative structures of River Plate Spanish. We attempt to explain the occurrence of this pronoun with a subgroup of existentialpresentational and scalar change verbs (Masullo 2014), which comprise multi-point scale verbs (e.g. adelgazarla, empeorarla, mejorarla), two-point scale verbs (e.g. morirla, pirarla, palmarla), and verbs of directed motion and change of location (e.g. aparecerla, llegarla, volverla). Based on the main tenets of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, and subsequent work), we set out to demonstrate that this is a productive and compositional phenomenon in this variety of Spanish. We propose that this accusative clitic-which combines with unaccusative predicates-is a morphological or post-syntactic clitic (Pujalte & Saab 2012), in that it is an expletive-like element not present in the syntactic derivation and inserted at PF. We argue that la is an allomorph of Ø and that these two exponents compete with the anticausative clitic se to lexicalise different features associated with Voice°. The data analysed in this variety of River Plate Spanish offer evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the absence of se in unmarked anticausative structures should not be equated to the absence of structure, but to the presence of a null morpheme Ø in Voice°. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]