The interplay of style, information structure and definiteness: Double indirect objects in Figuig Berber narratives

In Figuig Berber, like in many other Berber languages, it is possible to express the indirect object by a lexical expression and by a pronominal clitic in the same sentence1. This construction, called “dative doubling” in the literature, is in variation with constructions that do not have a pronominal clitic. In this article, dative doubling is studied in two corpora, one written corpus (Benamara 2011), and one spoken corpus, collected by the author. It is shown that dative doubling is all but absent in the written corpus, while it is quite frequent in the spoken corpus. In the spoken corpus, there is a clear correlation with information structure. Dative doubling is only rarely found with indirect objects that express new information, while it appears more than half of the times when indirect objects express old information. In addition, it is obligatory when expressing old information with the verb ini ‘to say’.