Null objects and accusative clitics in Romanian

Abstract

Starting from the identification of the obligatory contexts in which the Accusative clitic occurs in Romanian we offer a unifying analysis of its role across all the identified contexts. We argue that Accusative clitics in Romanian reflect a ban on D-linked null objects. The Person feature in D requires that it be overt with argumental individuated DPs and the Person feature in Inflection blocks feature Matching between a referential null object and its antecedent. The analysis of the contexts in which Accusative clitics occur and of the role of the preposition pe in clitic doubling constructions reveals that Romanian has two syntactic means of signaling topicality: D-linked topicality is signaled by clitics and speaker-linked topicality by the preposition pe.

Keywords

• Accusative clitics
• Discourse-linked topicality
• speaker-linked topicality
• null object
• Person