Diachronic source of two cliticization patterns in Slavic

This paper presents an analysis of a diachronic modification in the position of pronominal clitics in Slavic. The modification involved a switch from verb-adjacent clitics to second position clitics, but it occurred only in those languages that also lost tense morphology. The paper interprets the change as a loss of the TP projection, as a result of which clitics may not adjoin to a suitable syntactic head. The change has repercussions for the syntactic process of cliticization: second position clitics no longer have a designated position in the clause structure, but instead they land in specifiers of different functional heads above VP.

Published online: 27 June 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.206.06mig