Accusative versus dative agreement in Spanish: the salience of the initiator as a factor in morphological variation

Abstract This study focuses on the choice between Spanish accusative and dative clitics as a phenomenon of morphological variation with functional and cognitive implications. The analysis is based on a corpus of written digital media discourse, representing a variety close to the northern-central Peninsular standard. Dative forms are linked to higher salience of the object referent, as evidenced by their distribution in both ditransitive and monotransitive clauses with an identifiable agent or experiencer. It is hypothesized that the defocusing of the latter participant should increase the contextual salience of object referents, thus favoring the use of dative clitics. This is tested with two types of defocusing constructions, namely impersonal reflexives, and non-phoric plural third persons. The results show a marked dominance of the dative in the former context, owing to the fact that the event is construed as internal to the object, whereby the initiator becomes cognitively blurred. With plural third persons, while general dative rates are also comparably high, the initiator is often still perceivable, which makes formal choice more dependent on other factors related to transitivity. Clitic variation needs to be further analyzed as a simultaneously formal and meaningful phenomenon in different textual modalities and interactional settings.