Romanian pronominal plural clitics differ from their singular clitic counterparts in that they exhibit dative-accusative case syncretism. This contrast correlates with an asymmetry in the combinatorial possibilities of plural vs singular clitics: namely, plural clitics in direct object position in Romanian affect the acceptability of clitic clusters, as confirmed in quantitative acceptability judgements with multiple informants. Rather than invoking a new ‘Number Case Constraint’ governing the distribution of clitics, we link the Romanian data to familiar facts from Leísta dialects of Spanish, which manifest case syncretism between dative and animate accusative 3rd person clitics. We implement the fact that 1st and 2nd person plural clitics in Romanian are case-syncretic by implicationally marking them as inherently [+animate] in the syntax. The severe degradation in acceptability of clusters with direct object plural clitics is accounted for by following aspects of Adger & Harbour’s (2007) proposal for the connection between syncretism and the Person Case Constraint.
2011. Multiple agree with clitics: person complementarity vs. omnivorous number. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 29:4 ► pp. 939 ff.
Stegovec, Adrian
2020. Taking case out of the Person-Case Constraint. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 38:1 ► pp. 261 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Copyright Page. In The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology, ► pp. iv ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Abbreviations, symbols, journal acronyms, and other conventions. In The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology, ► pp. xv ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Textual sources. In The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology, ► pp. 479 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Preface. In The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology, ► pp. xiii ff.
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