Romance a-phrases and their clitic counterparts. Agreement and mismatches

DOM (Differential Object Marking) arguments in Romance are associated with the a/dative morphology typical of goal arguments, because both have the same syntactic structure of embedding (§1). Clitics do not necessarily share the case alignment of full pronouns/lexical DPs. Indeed clitics and lexical DPs are separately merged each in their domain. The case array may therefore be set differently (§2). DOM objects give rise to a number of patterns under cliticization, including the standard Spanish one, leísmo and loísmo/laísmo (the latter typical also of South Italian). This variation depends on the fact that lexical DPs may be associated with DOM though clitics aren’t (standard Spanish, loísmo/laísmo) or both may be associated with DOM (leísmo) (§3).