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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 16: Selected papers from the 47th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Newark, Delaware
Edited by Irene Vogel
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 16] 2020
► pp. 37–48

Person/Number exponents in imperative-enclitic contexts

| Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
| Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

The goal of this paper is to analyse the partial or total deletion of the Person/Number exponents in imperative-enclitic contexts in Catalan and Spanish. Both languages lose phonological material in a specific context, but Spanish deletes the right-edge segment from the verb whereas Barcelona Catalan loses the left-edge segment of the clitic. Our aim is to account for the contrasting solutions shown by these two neighbouring languages using the same constraints but ranked differently in the Optimality Theory framework. OT allows us to put together different types of grammatical requirements, including distinctness requirements, particularly a positional OCP constraint on Person/Number features, and faithfulness conditions, specifically the condition related with morpheme realization, all of which interact with alignment and markedness constraints.

Keywords: P/N exponent, enclisis, reflexive, markedness, deixis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Morphological structure of imperatives and reflexive clitics
    • 2.1Imperatives
    • 2.2Reflexive enclitics
    • 2.3Imperative-enclitic context resolutions
  • 3.OT account
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.16.03cab
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