| Sumario: | Rioplatense Spanish Clitic Left Dislocations with epithets contain a left-dislocated direct object DP, an in situ direct object epithet DP, and a direct object clitic, all three apparently referring to the same event participant. Previous proposals have focused on syntactic licensing mechanisms but how the epithet's meaning is integrated in the sentence has not been addressed. We assume a multi-propositional framework to first show that these sentences encode two propositions, one at-issue (asserted) and one not-at-issue (non-asserted). The content of the epithet is absent from the at-issue proposition and is interpreted as a main semantic predicate in the not-at-issue proposition. Furthermore, we argue that this not-at-issue predication is best understood as a conventional implicature. Second, the epithet has been assumed to (unproblematically) pick up the left-dislocated DP as subject of predication. However, with quantified DPs and in intensional contexts the subject of predication may be different from the left-dislocated DP. The behavior of the epithet in these cases is shown to be similar to the behavior of pronouns in intersentential anaphora, thus suggesting that the syntax of this construction is underlyingly biclausal.
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