Particular Features of Istro-Romanian Pronominal Clitics

This paper proposes an analysis of some morphophonological phenomena of Romanian pronominal clitics which have been treated so far as idiosyncrasies. I argue that pronominal clitics have only one underlying form and that surface forms are different because of the different environments in which they appear and because of their morphological properties. As will be shown, an Optimality Theoretic ranking of morphological and phonological constraints can account for the surface realisation of the clitics.

The Syntax of Romanian Clitics, 2019

This paper presents a syntactic account of Romanian clitic doubling and clitic clusters. It is shown that depending on feature specification of the argument, the direct object marker pe can behave either as a preposition or a case marker. If it is a preposition, the NP must be doubled by a clitic in order to satisfy the argument structure of the verb. If it is a case marker to the NP, the latter absorbs the case of the verb and satisfies its argument structure as well, hence precluding clitic doubling. As for clitic clusters, a sequence of two clitics must be compounded to form a new edge-bound element that can move under the OCP, without overloading the derivation. There are three types of compound rules, each of which operates in tandem with a series of phonological rules that alter their shapes. Ultimately these sandhi rules obliterate the boundary between the clitics, yielding a new word-like element. This fine-grained account, which relies heavily on grammatical features such as case, reference, π (tier-bound), ω (vector), and ψ (a series of traits like animate, definite, specific), runs like a clockwork. It makes it possible to predict all known peculiarities of clitic combinations, including the rigid dative-accusative ordering, the special behavior of the third feminine singular clitic, the lack of PCC effect, etc.

Journal of Linguistics 38(1). 174–176.

This paper analyses the placement of clitics that occupy the so-called "second" position in Serbian, in which both the first word or the first constituent can serve as host positions for clitics. In both corpus investigations and experimental research, we found that in Serbian there is more than one type of first position, both in the case of first word, and in the case of first constituent. Moreover, we found two types of cases depending on whether the sentence initial element is, or belongs to, either an argument or the predicate, yielding a four part classification. The experiments clearly establish preferred clitic placement in the two types of sentences. All four types are represented both in the investigated corpora and in the production and perception patterns, albeit in very different proportions. We attribute these differences to different discourse conditions between the first word and first phrase positions within each category.

This paper uses new evidence from elicited production experiments to establish that Romanian children do not omit either direct or indirect object clitics at a significant rate. The results reported for the acquisition of indirect object clitics are particularly significant in that, for the first time, it is possible to demonstrate the similarity between the acquisition of direct and indirect object clitics in Romanian and, arguably, for other languages that pattern with Romanian in the relevant respects. Furthermore, our findings receive a natural explanation if it is assumed that two conditions must be met for children to produce clitics. First, children’s grammars must not be constrained by any relevant grammatical constraints, such as the Unique Checking Constraint (Wexler 1998, 2003). Second, children must be able to produce utterances of the length required by the clitic constructions.

This study analyzes the position occupied by pronominal clitics in the clause with respect to the verb in old Romanian (OR) on the basis of an extensive corpus analysis of 16th – 18th century texts. The corpus analysis shows that, from the earliest texts, OR pronominal clitics are attested in second, third, fourth, etc. position in the clause, and exceptionally also in first position. Therefore, they do not fully observe the Tobler-Mussafia Law, which was in function in other old Romance languages. OR pronominal clitics are IP-clitics, which can be placed both in pre- and in postverbal position (proclisis and enclisis). Due to the gradual reduction of V-to-C movement, pronominal proclisis generalizes.

Proceedings of LFG2018, 2018

Direct object clitics in Modern Standard Romanian display different properties depending on whether or not they double an object. We propose a dual analysis for the clitics: they function as agreement makers when they double an object and as pronouns when they do not. Furthermore, the lexical entries differ beyond the presence or absence of pronominal referential features, and this accounts for the split behavior. The analysis is placed in its historical context and extended to other varieties of Romanian. Finally, we argue that the Romanian lexical split is not an isolated phenomenon: multiple similar splits can be found in the typology of agreement marking.

2009

I investigate the phonology of prosodic clitics-independent syntactic words not parsed as independent prosodic words-in Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian. I ask, first, how clitics are organized into prosodic structures, and second, how this is determined by the grammar. Following Zec (1997, 2005), I look at several clitic categories, including negation, prepositions, complementizers, conjunctions, and second-position clitics. Based on a reanalysis of word accent (Browne and McCawley 1965, Inkelas and Zec 1988, Zec 1999), I argue that in some cases where a preposition, complementizer, or conjunction fails to realize accent determined by a following word, it is not a procliticthat is, prosodified with the following word-but rather a free clitic parsed directly by a phonological phrase. Conversely, the second-position clitics are not always enclitic-that is, prosodified with a preceding word-but are sometimes free. Their second-position word order results not from enclisis, but from the avoidance of free clitics at phrase edges, where they would interfere with the alignment of phonological phrases to prosodic words. vii Regarding the determination of clisis by the grammar, I argue for an interface constraint approach (Selkirk 1995, Truckenbrodt 1995), whereby prosodic structures are built according to general constraints on their well-formedness, and on their interface to syntactic structures. I contrast this with the subcategorization approach, which sees clisis as specified for each clitic (Klavans 1982, Radanović-Kocić 1988, Zec and Inkelas 1990). The comparison across clitic categories provides key support for the interface constraint approach, showing that their prosody depends on their syntactic configurations and phonological shapes, rather than on arbitrary subcategorizations. Prosodic differences across categories are a derivative effect of their configuration in the clause, and of the division of the clause into phonological phrases. The relevance of phonological phrases consists in how their edges discourage some kinds of clisis, blocking, for example, proclisis of complementizers and conjunctions to their complements. Free clisis is disfavored at phrase edges, producing the second-position effect. Thus, the interface constraint approach leads to a unified account of word, phrase, and clitic prosody.

2001

Abstract: This article discusses Romanian clitics, a topic previously studied by Farkas, Kazazis, Monachesi and Steriade, among others. I show that Romanian clitics share surprisingly many more features with Serbo-Croatian–a Slavic language, than with French, a Romance language like Romanian itself. This unexpected result raises questions well above and beyond the topic of clitics alone. Why should a Romance language “behave” linguistically closer to a Slavic than to a Romance language?