EXPERIMENTAL DATA ON ROMANIAN DOUBLE OBJECT CONSTRUCTIONS

The goal of this paper is to present the results of an experiment carried out on Romanian ditransitive constructions and to put forth evidence in favor of a derivational analysis of these configurations. Numerous studies on Romance, paralleling accounts on English, have assumed structural differences between ditransitive configurations with clitic doubled indirect objects and their non-doubled counterparts, grouping the former sequences with Double Object Constructions (DOC) and the latter with Prepositional Datives. Against such approaches, we will argue that the distinction between the so-called DOCs and Prepositional Datives cannot actually be maintained for Romanian and that Romanian ditransitives instantiate the DOC configuration, irrespective of Clitic Doubling. Supporting this claim, the results of our experiment show that the two objects in the Romanian ditransitive construction have symmetrical binding potential and roughly equal privileges with respect to binding phenomena. We will thus argue that Romanian ditransitives instantiate the DOC configuration.