Romance Object Clitics

This book focuses on the evolution of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages. It aims to explore the empirical facets of cliticization and elaborate on the theoretical ramifications of the topic. On the empirical side, the book deals with data ranging from Latin to modern languages and less well-known dialects from all areas of Romance. Medieval vernaculars take centre stage both in the reconstruction of the evolution from Latin to Romance and in the modelling of clitic placement in the modern languages. Syntactic, phonological, and morphological aspects are examined, but the main focus is on syntactic placement, which is the hallmark of Romance clitics. On the theoretical side, the books engage with the previous literature, in particular with Generative literature. In recent decades, our understanding of Romance clitics has grown in symbiosis with the Generative theory, and the importance of most empirical findings cannot be fully appreciated without being acquainted with the terms of the ongoing debate. The book challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency. Instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which caused freezing of certain pronominal forms first and—through reanalysis—their successive incorporation into verbal hosts. This approach entails revising analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, climbing, and enclisis/proclisis alternations (the so-called Tobler-Mussafia law), and addressing orthogonal phenomena such as V2 syntax, scrambling, and stylistic fronting.

Clitic climbing

In verbal periphrases, Romance clitics either climb to the inflected verb or remain attached to the non-finite verb. The chapter argues that climbing depends on the point where auxiliaries—including restructuring predicates—are merged. Since the incorporation of clitics takes place in a clause-intermediate position (e.g. Ledgeway and Lombardi 2005), climbing does not take place when auxiliaries are first merged above the locus of incorporation. The same analysis is then extended to perfective auxiliaries in order to account for the dialects in which clitics do not climb in compound tenses and, lastly, for the dialects in which clitics never climb. The second part of the chapter focuses on the complicated system of clitic placement of Sanvalentinese, a southern Italian dialect in which optional climbing interacts with a kind of V2 requirement targeting both the I and V domain.

Theoretical preliminaries

The chapter introduces some terminological conventions and a simple representation of sentence structure for the analysis of clitic placement and other syntactic displacements. It elaborates on four key notions: dependencies, nesting, domains, and criteria. The term dependency refers to the relationship between the clitic and the syntactic position where the corresponding argument is (allegedly) projected. The second important factor regarding clitic placement has to do with the identification of the clausal domains where clitics can occur. The third relevant factor in the definition of clitic placement is nesting, i.e. the mechanism whereby clitics are attached to morphosyntactic structures. Lastly, clitic placement is dependent on discourse-driven displacements that are triggered by instructions termed criteria.

‘V2’ and clitic placement

In medieval Romance, as well as in present-day western Ibero-Romance, enclisis and proclisis alternate in finite main positive clauses. Such alternations are usually subsumed under the so-called Tobler-Mussafia law, which has been subject to several reformulations in order to relate clitic placement to other syntactic properties. This chapter shows that the hypothesis linking enclisis and verb movement is ultimately correct, although the examples supporting the hypothesis are relatively rare, the correlation between enclisis and verb movement is a bit more complicated than assumed in part of the literature, and no formal machinery proposed so far accounts adequately for clitic placement. This chapter endorses Benincà’s (1995, 2006) hypothesis, according to which the verb moves in two steps, yielding, respectively, subject inversion and V2 orders, when the verb targets a lower position in the left periphery, and enclisis, when the verb climbs higher.

Left Branch Extraction and Clitic Placement in Gaulish

The inscriptional remains of Gaulish preserve syntactic behaviours that are not expected from the perspective of the diachronic schemes usually posited for the development of early Insular Celtic syntax from Proto-Indo-European. Widespread evidence is attested, particularly for the behaviour of clitics, that does not seem reconcilable with many of the assumptions made in previous studies regarding the nature of the syntax of Proto-Celtic. Gaulish also evidently features scrambling-type phenomena such as left branch extraction that are not usually thought to appear in other Celtic languages. An analysis which begins with an assessment of these features leads to a more empirically predicated and consistent understanding of the early development of Celtic word order than has been proffered previously.

On “free” grammatical variation in a mixed lect: Clitic placement in Cypriot Greek

Variation involving a switch between pre- and post-verbal placement of pronominal object clitics in a single syntactic environment within a language is unexpected. The rationale why this would not be expected is clear: Languages pattern as either proclitic or enclitic with respect to object clitic placement, possibly allowing one or the other option across different syntactic environments. We provide an overview of our research from data collected in Cyprus, related to the development and use of pronominal object clitics for child populations and adult speakers that are bilectal in Cypriot and Standard Modern Greek. While it has been shown that the tested bilectal populations receive exposure to more than one distinct grammar, including mixed grammars with optional choices for clitic placement, an important question remains unaddressed: Is variation really “free” across all speakers or are there universally reliable predictors (such as gender, age, or level of education) that mediate a consistent use of either the standard or the dialect? Combining insights from targeted elicitation tasks administered to different groups, a corpus of spontaneous speech, and an extensive literature review, we show the weakness of such purported predictors and support a claim of free variation.

Efeitos de dominância linguística e de tempo de exposição formal à língua na produção de pronomes clíticos por crianças bilingues português/francês

This study investigates the effects of two external linguistic variables – language dominance and time of formal exposure – on the production and placement of clitic pronouns of Portuguese-French bilingual children. Using two elicited production tasks and a parental sociolinguistic questionnaire, we show that language dominance plays a role in rates of omission and rates of clitic production. On the other hand, a higher time of formal exposure to Portuguese does not determine better performance neither in what concerns clitic omission nor clitic placement in Portuguese-French bilingual children.

A Usage-Based Perspective on Spanish Variable Clitic Placement

This study provides a usage-based analysis of Spanish Variable Clitic Placement (VCP). A variationist analysis of VCP in spoken Argentine Spanish indicates that VCP grammar is constrained by lexical (finite verb) and semantic (animacy) factors. Considering the finite effect, the study focuses on usage-based accounts for the gradience attested across finite verb constructions. Grammaticalized meaning and increased frequency tend to account for VCP in general. However, one [tener que + infinitive] construction is found exceptional in that it favors enclisis despite its grammaticalized meaning of obligation and its high frequency of use. Data from a larger corpus indicate that the [tener que + infinitive] construction lacks unithood, signaling great analyzability of its component elements. Through an exemplar analysis, the [haber que ‘must’ + infinitive] construction that categorically takes enclisis and which is strongly linked to [tenerque + infinitive] diachronically, semantically, and structurally emerges as a likely analogical model for VCP with tener que, pushing tener que towards enclisis. This study not only illustrates how usage-based linguistics can capture VCP more generally, but also how this framework provides powerful tools to discover the constraints on VCP in naturalistic use in order to account for individual construction behavior.

Tense Driven Asymmetries and Clitic Placement in Compound Verbs of Pashto Language

The tense driven asymmetry of the Pashto clause is analyzed from the perspective of the minimalist framework The study proves that the split ergativity in Pashto is tense based and does not have the aspect driven features proposed by Roberts 2000 The study argues that the object is assigned a theta role by the V and the subject is assigned a theta role by the little v The accusative case is assigned by the little v but the nominative and ergative cases are assigned by T It claims that the T head assigns multiple cases as the split ergativity is tense driven It highlights the syntactic effects of the possible phonological processes in combining some of the closely adjacent words and making a single phonological word The study also discusses clitic placement and prosodic inversion to refute the assumption that perfective feature is a strong feature in Pashto

On clitic placement and gradience of strength of FP in Western Ibero-Romance

Old (Medieval and Classical) Spanish permitted finite enclisis and as such is classified as a strong-F language, as are many archaic varieties of Romance languages. Notable about Old Spanish is that, prior to the 1500s, interpolation arrangements were acceptable and rather common, as is still the case of Galician and some dialects of Portuguese. However, from the 1500s onward, interpolation in Old Spanish was no longer productive, much like modern Asturian. This is evidence that the “strong-weak” dichotomy of FP is insufficient to explain the situation of the languages. I argue that the strength of FP should be described as not only “weak” or “strong,” but instead on a gradient scale to distinguish languages that permit a range of possible clitic arrangements.