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Sound, Syntax and Contact in the Languages of Asturias
Edited by Guillermo Lorenzo
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 36] 2022
► pp. 73–92

Chapter 4
Are Asturian clitics distinctly distinct?

| University of Oviedo

This chapter is focused on an idiosyncratic feature of Asturian in the context of other neighboring Romance languages. In all these languages, the regular clitic forms for the third person dative and the third person accusative cannot cluster together; as a consequence, one or the other must be replaced by another item or they must fuse into a single form. In Asturian, however, clitics remain the same in that context. This chapter explores the thesis that such a state of affairs is due to the fact that the Asturian dative clitics incorporate the properties of a locative and justifies it historically.

Keywords: pronominal clitics, distinctness, morphology, modern and Medieval Asturian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background: Clitic clusters and Distinctness
  • 3.Distinctness in Asturian clitics: A first insight from history
  • 4.Distinctness mayday: Locatives to the rescue
  • 5.Some theoretical consequences concerning the internal composition of clitics
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 1 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.36.04lor
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