The Syntax Of Pronominal Clitics

Preliminary Material /Hagit Borer --Introduction /Hagit Borer --Three Issues in the Theory of Clitics: Case, Doubled NPs, and Extraction /Osvaldo A. Jaeggli --Clitics in Yoruba /Douglas Pulleyblank --On Chain Formation /Luigi Rizzi --On the Derivation of en-Clitics /W. Neil Elliott --Cliticization from NPs in Czech and Comparable Phenomena in French and Italian /Jindřich Toman --Pronominal Clitic Clusters and Templates /J. Simpson and M. Withgott --Syntactic Cliticization and Lexical Cliticization: The Case of Hebrew Dative Clitics /Hagit Borer and Yosef Grodzinsky --The Interpretation and Acquisition of Italian Impersonal SI /Nina Hyams --On Italian SI /Maria Rita Manzini --On Some Properties of French Clitic Se /Eric Wehrli --Clitics in American Sign Language /Judy Anne Kegl --The Pronominal “Copula” as Agreement Clitic /Edit Doron --Subject Clitics and the NOM-Drop Parameter /Ken Safir --References /Hagit Borer --Index /Hagit Borer.

This collective monograph is the first data-oriented, empirical in-depth study of the system of clitics on Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. It fills the gap between the theoretical and normative literature by including solid data on variation found in dialects and spoken language and obtained from massive Web Corpora and speakers’ acceptability judgements. The authors investigate three primary sources of variation: inventory, placement and morphonological processes. A separate part of the book is dedicated to the phenomenon of clitic climbing, the major challenge for any syntactic theory. The theory of complexity serves as the explanation for the very diverse constraints on clitic climbing established in the empirical studies. It allows to construct a series of hierarchies where the factors relevant for predicting clitic climbing interact with each other. Thus, the study pushes our understanding of clitics away from fine-grained descriptions and syntactic generalisations towards a probabilistic modelling of syntax.

As a typical interface phenomenon, clitics have become increasingly important in linguistic theory during the last decade. The present book contributes to the recent discussion and first provides a comprehensive overview of clitic sequencing, clitic placement and clitic doubling in the major Romance languages. In addition, new data from a northern Italian dialect are introduced. The author then gives a critical summary of the current morphological analyses of clitic phenomena. She also discusses recent Optimality-theoretical analyses of clitic combinations and clitic placement and shows how these analyses can be improved upon when we also consider a morphological treatment of clitics. This book provides innovative solutions to clitic phenomena within the framework of a constraint-based morphological theory and will be of interest not only to morphologists, syntacticians and those working on the grammar of Romance languages, but also to linguists who are interested in the organisation of the grammar and the lexicon.

Two issues little discussed in the generative literature are the internal structure of pronouns and what it is in Syntax that triggers pronominal reference. This monograph treats these two topics in detail and investigates whether pronominal (strong, weak and clitic pronouns) and related elliptical expressions can be given a unified syntactic representation. The answer, derived from a wealth of cross-linguistic evidence, is largely affirmative: pronominals include a semantically empty noun as part of their internal structure. The case of null subjects in ‘pro-drop’ languages is also examined and it is argued that they are not empty pronominal categories but, rather, the reflex of a ‘verbal determiner’. Finally, using the internal structure of pronouns as a sort of ‘litmus paper’, the book explores the relationship between functional and lexical heads as well as the notions of selection and licensing in syntax, and offers new insights into the categorial status of functional categories.

Using data from a variety of languages, this book investigates the place of clitics in the theory of language structure, and their implications for the relationships between syntax, morphology and phonology. It is argued that the least powerful theory of language requires us to recognise at least two classes of clitics, one with the syntax of independent phrases and the other with the syntax of inflectional affixes. It is also argued that prosodic conditions may influence the surface position of clitics beyond what may be accomplished by filtering potential syntactic structures. Finally, the relationship between syntactic, morphological, and phonological constituents within wordlike elements is explored.

Traditional grammars have stated that clitics are subject or object pronouns whose distributional features make them different from personal pronouns. This book focuses on the acquisition of personal and demonstrative pronouns as well as clitics with respect to determinative phrases in a variety of languages of the Romance family and several indigenous languages, such as Quechua. A particularly original aspect of the present volume is that it not only addresses syntactic issues, but also semantic and pragmatic questions that have been widely neglected in the literature. It also reports on acquisition data of languages, such as Quechua, which have not attracted the attention of researchers until very recently.

claim is that such morphological processes can be learnt without symbolization and innate knowledge. See Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) for the original model of past tense acquisition, Plunkett and Marchman (1993), Nakisa, Plunkett and Hahn (1996) and Elman et al. (1996) for developments and extensions to other morphological processes, and Marcus et al. (1992) and Pinker and Prince (1988) for criticism. One line of investigation supporting the view of language as a genetic endowment is closely linked to traditional research on language acquisition and argues as follows: If language is innate there must be phenomena that should be accessible from birth in one form or the other. Thus it is clear that the language of children, especially young children and preferably babies should be investigated. As babies unfortunately don't talk, the abilities that are available from birth must be established in ways different from the usual linguistic analysis. Psycholinguistic research of the last few years has shown that at the age of 4 and 8 months and even during their first week of life children already have important language skills. From the fourth day, infants distinguish their mother tongue from other languages. From the first months children prefer the sound of speech to 'other noise'. At the age of 4 months, infants prefer pauses at syntactic boundaries to random pauses.

Clitics are grammatical elements that are treated as independent words in syntax but form a phonological unit with the word that precedes or follows it. This volume brings together the facts about clitics in the Slavic languages, where they have become a focal points of recent research. The authors draw relevant generalizations across the Slavic languages and highlight the importance of these phenomena for linguistic theory.

Pronominal clitics in Standard Arabic, and also in other languages, pose challenging problems for syntactic theory. This is due to the fact that pronominal clitics exhibit conflicting properties; which makes it difficult to provide answers to a number of issues. This book provides an investigation into the syntax of pronominal clitics in Standard Arabic within the framework of the minimalist theory developed by Chomsky. It particularly addresses a range of issues, such as: the syntactic status of pronominal clitics, the syntactic position in which they are generated, the syntactic movement they undergo, the derivation of their enclitic form, and the kind of similarities and differences that Standard Arabic pronominal clitics may display with respect to their counterparts in other languages. The book will be of interest to linguists, teachers, researchers and to anyone interested in language study and syntactic theory.