Conclusions

My intentions in writing this book were (i) to collect phenomena and put them in logical/chronological order and (ii) to engage with the analysis of some (syntactic) phenomena that yield variation across space and time such as enclisis/proclisis alternations, clitic climbing, and cluster formation. Concluding remarks are organized in two lists. The first mainly restates known empirical conclusions, refines previous analyses, or establishes very general theoretical anchors that may provide some guidelines for future research. The second focuses on more specific conclusions relating to generative theorizing.

Historical overview

The chapter overviews the evolution from Latin pronouns to present-day object clitics. The discussion of Latin focuses on the relationship between pronominal syntax and three main factors: information packaging, verb movement, and the licensing of null objects. Then the chapter examines the earliest Romance documents (eighth–ninth century) and elaborates on the distinction between archaic and innovative early Romance languages. The former allowed interpolation, i.e. the presence of material between proclitics and the verb, while the latter exhibited adverbal clitics, which are always attached to a verbal host. The loss of enclisis/proclisis alternations in finite clauses (Tobler-Mussafia effects) marks the transition towards modern systems. Further variation across modern vernaculars results from clitic climbing, which is often lost in restructuring contexts and, to a lesser extent, in compound and simple tenses. Lastly, the chapter overviews several systematic changes affecting the order of sequences formed by two or more object clitics.

Deriving enclisis in ‘V1’ clauses

The chapter deals with the syntax of early Romance clauses exhibiting enclisis, which usually occurs when the verb occupies the first position in the clause (V1) or is immediately preceded by topics. This chapter accounts for enclisis/V1 within languages that exhibit properties of V2 systems. The analysis is based on two hypotheses: (i) V2 results from a Criterion that triggers fronting of an XP to the Operator/Focus position; and (ii) V1 and enclisis result when no XP is fronted and, instead, the inflected verb is merged in the Operator/Focus position via Long Head Movement (Lema and Rivero’s 1991). When the verb performs Long Head Movement, clitics cannot undergo incorporationd into the verb and enclisis results. Besides enclisis, the above analysis provides a better account of other phenomena such as the syntax of focus expletives, Stylistic Fronting, mesoclisis, and fragment answers.

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.

Syntactic evidence against deficiency

The chapter revolves around the notion of deficiency. It is a widely held view that clitics do not have the same distribution as strong pronouns because the former have a deficient inner structure (Cardinaletti and Starke 1999 amond others). By the same token, languages display an intermediate class of weak pronouns, sharing properties of clitic and strong pronouns. The hypothesis of an intermediate class is particularly attractive for a diachronic analysis, as weak elements are the cornerstone of the evolution from strong pronouns to clitics. This chapter provides an in-depth discussion of the status of weak elements with a twofold intent: first, to show that weak pronouns do not form a consistent class across languages and second, to challenge the hypothesis that deficient elements are obtained when the outer structural layer of strong pronouns peels off.

Clitic combinations

One of the major sources of microvariation is the ordering of combinations formed by two or more clitics. Diachronically, cross-linguistic variation increased over time because certain Romance languages have undergone a change, reversing the order of some clitic combinations (in particular, those containing a third person accusative element or the clitic en/ne). The chapter entertains the hypothesis that variation is due to a change in the syntactic structure whereby clitics are nested within clause structure (Kayne 1994). Clitics were originally nested in a separate position, while later on they began to form a single complex head. This change, which took place at a different pace and not in all the Romance languages, caused the emergence of various subclasses of clitic combinations, which differ in syntactic and morphological respects.

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.

Introduction

This book focuses on the evolution of object clitics in the Romance languages (from now on, simply clitics). Cliticization is a major domain of research in the field of Romance linguistics. Furthermore, clitics raise many research questions that are of interest to general linguists working in any field of the discipline: phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, acquisition, pathology, etc. In fact, clitics offer clues or raise problems regarding a wealth of linguistic issues, including phonological domains, information structure, syntactic movement, and language impairments. Yet scholars are seldom aware of the many empirical facets of cliticization or have not fully considered the theoretical ramifications of the topic....

‘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.

Clitics in embryo

The chapter aims to provide a principled account of the emergence of clitic pronouns in the transition from Latin to early Romance. The discussion revolves around the hypothesis that a double series of pronouns (which in Late Latin were still homophonous) emerged from the reanalysis of a discourse-driven displacement. So-called weak pronouns in Latin are strong pronouns that are displaced to the Wackernagel Position, which is analysed as a Criterial Position in the sense of Rizzi (2006, 2007). Productive interpolation in medieval Portuguese and Spanish results from the same syntactic displacement, but the Romance languages, unlike Latin, have exhibited a double series of pronouns (clitic/strong) from the earliest attestations. The emergence of a second series of pronouns witnesses a change in the morphophonological status of pronouns, which is the prelude to another change which will yield the incorporation of clitics into verbal hosts.