Spanish expresses the direct object argument of transitive clauses as a Direct Object Clitic, as a lexical or independent pronominal NP, or both ((Direct Object) Clitic Doubling). The latter structure presents an obvious puzzle to theories that assume one form or another of functional uniqueness. Although much research has been devoted to the structural representation and semantics of DOCLD, a rather natural question has been left uninvestigated in the linguistic literature: what drives these different types of expression?
In this paper I analyze the Rioplatense dialect (henceforth RSp), which is generally described as allowing CLD more freely than other dialects (including Standard Peninsular Spanish). Using the apparatus of OT, I investigate the relation between discourse structure, cross-linguistic markedness hierarchies, and formal expression of direct objects. My examples come from a corpus of four texts that I reference in the appendix, augmented by examples from the Internet which are in the public domain. Where no source is cited, the example is a constructed one, usually a modified example from the corpus.