Some Clitic Combinations in the Syntax of Romance

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to account for certain gaps in the syntactic distribution of certain combinations of clitics in varieties of Aragonese, Catalan, Occitan and Spanish. A view in which ordering of clitics is only determined by templates is insufficient since templates enter into play after the syntactic component, either in the morphology or in some other post-syntactic compo- nent. The alternative I propose is to assume that the ordering of clitic combinations can be done in the syntax, as anticipated by Kayne (1994) and Terzi (1999). I will specifically propose that some of the anomalies involve clitic combinations that are actually non-constituents (split cli- tics) while in others one element is not actually a clitic but an element with a different morpho- logical status or weak pronominals as in Cardinaletti and Starke (1999).

Keywords

• clitic combination
• templates
• split clitics
• weak pronouns
• morphology