Linguists have been drawn to the intriguing nature of clitics ever since the golden age of philology in the 19th century. In this paper we aim to provide a brief history of different approaches to clitics, from Wackernagel’s law to modern theories that link clitics to phases. We also present the papers that follow in this volume and show how they fit into the overall picture of research done on clitics in the 21st century.
This paper discusses the proclisis-enclisis alternation of object clitics in finiteness sensitive and Tobler-Mussafia languages. I argue that proclisis/enclisis can be derived via the interaction of syntactic and PF operations, at least in a number of environments, although purely syntactic or PF derivations are also possible but rare. I present an outline of how certain proclitic and enclitic structures are derived, using a grammatical model in which syntax feeds PF, and I try to show how much of the alternation is syntactic and how much is PF. The implications for head movement are also discussed.
This paper contributes to the literature that discusses the trigger for enclisis and proclisis alternations. Empirically, this article presents new data from Asturian, a Western Iberian Romance language which, unlike Galician and European Portuguese, exhibits enclisis also in finite embedded contexts. I argue that this empirical evidence supports an analysis of enclisis/proclisis alternations in terms of syntactic A′- or X0-movement to Finiteness0. I illustrate the different interpretations that enclisis/proclisis alternations give rise to in the finite embedded context in Asturian, and I show how they are naturally captured by the proposed analysis. Moreover, the unavailability of embedded enclisis in Galician and European Portuguese can be easily explained, ultimately relating to differences in the complementizer system in this group of languages.
Clitics often involve intricate interaction between different grammar components, including morphophonology, syntax and information structure. This phenomenon is challenging from a general theoretical perspective. In Wolof, clitization has been investigated using a transformational approach. In contrast, this paper proposes a formal analysis of Wolof clitics using a non-transformational model based on the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) theory. This approach needs no special rule for verb movements at all and preserves the lexical integrity of words. For sake of concreteness, the theoretical purpose is combined with an implementation that illustrates how the LFG formalism is well suited to a precise treatment of clitics.
In this paper, we argue that the architecture of grammar proposed in Distributed Morphology can shed light on the diachronic shift that has occurred in Portuguese enclisis. Employing such a view of the architecture of grammar allows us to interpret this shift as a case of grammaticalization, thus broadening the treatment of this concept in the framework of generative grammar. In Modern European Portuguese, enclitic pronouns are more affix-like than proclitic pronouns, both syntactically and phonologically. We argue that enclisis in Modern Portuguese is due to Lowering, a post-syntactic incorporation process, whereas clitics in Classical Portuguese must be displaced from the beginning of an Intonational Phrase, and as such, enclisis in this language period is a result of Prosodic Inversion.
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.
This paper explores how weak erotetic vajon ‘whether, if…at all’ interacts with the interrogative clitic -e ‘QCL’ in polarity questions and with wh-words in non-polarity and multiple wh-questions in Hungarian. Vajon ‘if…at all’, sitting in ForceP, forms an expletive–associate chain with FINP, which hosts the polarity interrogative clitic -e ‘QCL’. Whenever the INT operator forms an OP-variable chain with the interrogative clitic -e ‘QCL’, this chain blocks Long wh-movement out of subordinate clauses. Weak erotetic vajon ‘if…at all’ signals such OP-variable chains. The same holds for subordinate multiple wh-questions, where the INT….wh-word chain blocks the extraction of another wh-word.
This article examines subject and object pronominal markers in Cajun French, a mainly oral variety of French spoken in Southwestern Louisiana. The data show that although Cajun shares a certain amount of features with other colloquial and dialectal French varieties, it cannot be analyzed along quite the same lines. I will show that it has come further than these varieties in the grammaticalization process of its pronominal markers towards affixal agreement markers, and that they are even in the process of being reduced to nothing and replaced by strong forms.
This paper explores pronominal clitic placement in a mixed clitic placement variety, Cypriot Greek, and the restrictions on it in the presence of the dialectal element -nde. -Nde appears as a verb suffix, but imposes syntactic and morphological restrictions in the clause. We argue that -nde is a borrowed element from Turkish and it behaves as a validational marker (Weber 1986) in Cypriot Greek, expressing the truth validity of the speaker’s judgment. Challenging the true nature of clitics and affixes, the discussion focuses on the possibility of clitic-like elements appearing as suffixes. The ungrammaticality yielded with both -nde and post-verbal object clitics leads to the observation that the two need to appear adjacent to the verb.
This paper describes the acquisition of Italian object pronouns by a trilingual girl who simultaneously acquires Italian, Russian, and Norwegian. Different processes were distinguished according to the subject’s age at the time of acquisition. Italian first- and second-person singular clitics were produced correctly during the first stage (at age 2;2) but were replaced by tonic forms after the age of three, while third-person singular clitics were used in a target-consistent manner. On the basis of these data I shall discuss different approaches to Italian clitics.
This paper deals with the morpho-phonology of Italo-Romance clitic clusters. It argues that morpho-phonological processes (i.e. apocope, prosthesis, etc.) are sensitive to both the syntactic make-up of clitic clusters and their prosodic structure. The first part of the paper aims to support the hypothesis that a clitic cluster is a Foot, daughter to a recursive Prosodic Word (Peperkamp 1995, 1996, 1997). The second part of the paper accounts for the distribution of the apocopated clitic l (< lo ‘it/him’/‘the.m.sg’) in early Italo-Romance. I show that the distribution of l follows from syllabic and alignment constraints compatible with the foot-based analysis. The last section addresses a puzzling vowel alternation which targets the leftmost clitic of certain clusters in Old and Modern Italian.
In Old French, all clitic clusters containing objects observed the order ACC–DAT. During the 15th and 16th centuries this order was changed into DAT–ACC in cases where objects of the 1st and 2nd person were involved. This change took place rather abruptly. In this paper I will argue that increased use of reflexive forms provoked a change in the order in these clitic clusters. More specifically, I will argue that clusters involving 1st and 2nd person argumental clitics form true clusters in Modern French (in the sense of Pescarini (2012)), whereas they formed split clusters in the old language.
Linguists have been drawn to the intriguing nature of clitics ever since the golden age of philology in the 19th century. In this paper we aim to provide a brief history of different approaches to clitics, from Wackernagel’s law to modern theories that link clitics to phases. We also present the papers that follow in this volume and show how they fit into the overall picture of research done on clitics in the 21st century.
This paper discusses the proclisis-enclisis alternation of object clitics in finiteness sensitive and Tobler-Mussafia languages. I argue that proclisis/enclisis can be derived via the interaction of syntactic and PF operations, at least in a number of environments, although purely syntactic or PF derivations are also possible but rare. I present an outline of how certain proclitic and enclitic structures are derived, using a grammatical model in which syntax feeds PF, and I try to show how much of the alternation is syntactic and how much is PF. The implications for head movement are also discussed.
This paper contributes to the literature that discusses the trigger for enclisis and proclisis alternations. Empirically, this article presents new data from Asturian, a Western Iberian Romance language which, unlike Galician and European Portuguese, exhibits enclisis also in finite embedded contexts. I argue that this empirical evidence supports an analysis of enclisis/proclisis alternations in terms of syntactic A′- or X0-movement to Finiteness0. I illustrate the different interpretations that enclisis/proclisis alternations give rise to in the finite embedded context in Asturian, and I show how they are naturally captured by the proposed analysis. Moreover, the unavailability of embedded enclisis in Galician and European Portuguese can be easily explained, ultimately relating to differences in the complementizer system in this group of languages.
Clitics often involve intricate interaction between different grammar components, including morphophonology, syntax and information structure. This phenomenon is challenging from a general theoretical perspective. In Wolof, clitization has been investigated using a transformational approach. In contrast, this paper proposes a formal analysis of Wolof clitics using a non-transformational model based on the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) theory. This approach needs no special rule for verb movements at all and preserves the lexical integrity of words. For sake of concreteness, the theoretical purpose is combined with an implementation that illustrates how the LFG formalism is well suited to a precise treatment of clitics.
In this paper, we argue that the architecture of grammar proposed in Distributed Morphology can shed light on the diachronic shift that has occurred in Portuguese enclisis. Employing such a view of the architecture of grammar allows us to interpret this shift as a case of grammaticalization, thus broadening the treatment of this concept in the framework of generative grammar. In Modern European Portuguese, enclitic pronouns are more affix-like than proclitic pronouns, both syntactically and phonologically. We argue that enclisis in Modern Portuguese is due to Lowering, a post-syntactic incorporation process, whereas clitics in Classical Portuguese must be displaced from the beginning of an Intonational Phrase, and as such, enclisis in this language period is a result of Prosodic Inversion.
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.
This paper explores how weak erotetic vajon ‘whether, if…at all’ interacts with the interrogative clitic -e ‘QCL’ in polarity questions and with wh-words in non-polarity and multiple wh-questions in Hungarian. Vajon ‘if…at all’, sitting in ForceP, forms an expletive–associate chain with FINP, which hosts the polarity interrogative clitic -e ‘QCL’. Whenever the INT operator forms an OP-variable chain with the interrogative clitic -e ‘QCL’, this chain blocks Long wh-movement out of subordinate clauses. Weak erotetic vajon ‘if…at all’ signals such OP-variable chains. The same holds for subordinate multiple wh-questions, where the INT….wh-word chain blocks the extraction of another wh-word.
This article examines subject and object pronominal markers in Cajun French, a mainly oral variety of French spoken in Southwestern Louisiana. The data show that although Cajun shares a certain amount of features with other colloquial and dialectal French varieties, it cannot be analyzed along quite the same lines. I will show that it has come further than these varieties in the grammaticalization process of its pronominal markers towards affixal agreement markers, and that they are even in the process of being reduced to nothing and replaced by strong forms.
This paper explores pronominal clitic placement in a mixed clitic placement variety, Cypriot Greek, and the restrictions on it in the presence of the dialectal element -nde. -Nde appears as a verb suffix, but imposes syntactic and morphological restrictions in the clause. We argue that -nde is a borrowed element from Turkish and it behaves as a validational marker (Weber 1986) in Cypriot Greek, expressing the truth validity of the speaker’s judgment. Challenging the true nature of clitics and affixes, the discussion focuses on the possibility of clitic-like elements appearing as suffixes. The ungrammaticality yielded with both -nde and post-verbal object clitics leads to the observation that the two need to appear adjacent to the verb.
This paper describes the acquisition of Italian object pronouns by a trilingual girl who simultaneously acquires Italian, Russian, and Norwegian. Different processes were distinguished according to the subject’s age at the time of acquisition. Italian first- and second-person singular clitics were produced correctly during the first stage (at age 2;2) but were replaced by tonic forms after the age of three, while third-person singular clitics were used in a target-consistent manner. On the basis of these data I shall discuss different approaches to Italian clitics.
This paper deals with the morpho-phonology of Italo-Romance clitic clusters. It argues that morpho-phonological processes (i.e. apocope, prosthesis, etc.) are sensitive to both the syntactic make-up of clitic clusters and their prosodic structure. The first part of the paper aims to support the hypothesis that a clitic cluster is a Foot, daughter to a recursive Prosodic Word (Peperkamp 1995, 1996, 1997). The second part of the paper accounts for the distribution of the apocopated clitic l (< lo ‘it/him’/‘the.m.sg’) in early Italo-Romance. I show that the distribution of l follows from syllabic and alignment constraints compatible with the foot-based analysis. The last section addresses a puzzling vowel alternation which targets the leftmost clitic of certain clusters in Old and Modern Italian.
In Old French, all clitic clusters containing objects observed the order ACC–DAT. During the 15th and 16th centuries this order was changed into DAT–ACC in cases where objects of the 1st and 2nd person were involved. This change took place rather abruptly. In this paper I will argue that increased use of reflexive forms provoked a change in the order in these clitic clusters. More specifically, I will argue that clusters involving 1st and 2nd person argumental clitics form true clusters in Modern French (in the sense of Pescarini (2012)), whereas they formed split clusters in the old language.