Inflectional morphology and syntax in correspondence

Clitic pronouns in European Portuguese differ from clitics in other Romance languages in two important ways: (1) preverbal clitics can take wide scope over coordinated verb phrases and can be separated from the verb by (up to two) non-projecting particles (Crysmann 2002, Luís 2004); (2) the preverbal placement of clitics is dependent on a heterogeneous set of particles and phrases in preverbal position rather than on the finiteness of the verb. In this paper, we account for both (1) and (2) within the lexicalist theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) (Kaplan and Bresnan 1982, Bresnan 2001). As to (1), we show that the scopal and distributional properties of proclitics can be straightforwardly captured by placing morphological tokens in correspondence with syntactic atoms. As to (2), we argue that the effect of proclitc triggers on clitic placement can receive a unified accounted if proclitic contexts are defined in terms of functional precedence (Kaplan and Zaenen 1989).