Clitic doubling or object agreement: the view from Amharic

Object agreement is the realization of phi features on v, whereas clitic doubling is often analyzed as the movement of a D head in order to attach to a verb. In principle, these two phenomena are distinct, but in practice they can be difficult to distinguish. In this paper, I take up the issue for the Amharic object marker, a morpheme that co-varies with the phi features of an internal argument. Evidence from its distribution and morphological form indicate that it is a doubled clitic, but it also displays a handful of properties characteristic of agreement. Building on some of the most recent clitic doubling research, I develop an Agree-based clitic doubling analysis of the object marker that accounts for both its doubled clitic-like and agreement-like properties. Overall, the paper is a case study in how to distinguish clitic doubling and agreement in a particular language, and an investigation of how to capture the relationship between these two deeply similar phenomena in linguistic theory.