Behind second position – Towards a usage-based perspective of second position clitics (original) (raw)

On second position clitics crosslinguistically

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2016

This paper examines factors that are responsible for the availability of second position clitic systems crosslinguistically based on a variety of unrelated languages, including (but not limited to) Pama-Nyungan, Uto-Aztecan, Iranian, Slavic, and Romance languages. The proposed account has consequences for a variety of phenomena, including the Lobeck (1990)/Saito and Murasugi (1990) generalization that functional heads can license ellipsis of their complement only when they undergo Spec-Head agreement, preposition-stranding, and the licensing of pro.

On the syntax and prosody of Verb Second and Clitic Second

Rethinking Verb Second

This chapter argues that V2 and clitic second should not be unified structurally. Second-position clitics do not all occur in a fixed position high in the clause (they can, in fact, occur rather low in the structure), differing from the verb in V2 in this respect, and second-position clitic systems are incompatible with the presence of definite articles in the language, in contrast to V2. Clitic second and V2 clauses also differ with respect to their mobility, the latter being immobile. Clitic second and V2 are, however, shown to share important prosodic properties, which is taken to indicate that the two should be unified at least to some extent prosodically (with clitic second, the second position is in fact defined prosodically: clitics are second within their intonational phrase). Factoring out the prosodic properties of V2 is also shown to simplify the syntax of V2. From this perspective, the chapter provides accounts of a number of properties of V2, including the root/embedded...

Introduction. The Grammar of Clitics

2002

Interest in clitics originates probably from their special character. As elements which are neither words nor affixes but share some of their properties, they are an especially fruitful ground to test grammatical theories. Such properties include phonological shape, allomorphy, cooccurence restrictions, position in the sentence, and semantic interpretation, thus covering a wide range of phenomena that affect all grammatical components. It is not at all clear whether the notion «clitic» corresponds to some linguistic primitive (or several), although some clitic-related categories, like clitic group as a prosodic category, have been proposed. The general properties of what has been classified as a clitic also varies, depending on the language and the specific clitic analyzed. Some authors, beginning with Zwicky (1977), follow the distinction simple clitic/special clitic. According to this view, simple clitics are usually deaccented, sometimes phonologically reduced function words, like the French preposition de, the reduced auxiliaries 's, 'd, 'll, etc. in English, or the enclitic conjunction que in Latin. This kind of clitics does not seem to present far-reaching syntactic differences when compared to their nonclitic counterparts or equivalent forms (French preposition contre, English is, would, will, etc., and Latin conjunction atque). (1) a. John is a lawyer. b. John's a lawyer. Special clitics, on the other hand, show many properties which are specific to them, and that their nonclitic counterparts do not share. Typical examples of this type are pronominal clitics, which attach to the verb, as in Romance, or to second position in the sentence, as in some Slavic languages. The special character of clitics is usually related to syntax or semantics. Consider the following Spanish examples, which display the pronominal clitic lo and its strong counterparts. (2) a. Míralo! look-IMP+it/him 'Look at it!'

(2014) Clitics, Procedural Elements and Spanish Syntax

ReVEL 12 (22) March, 2014. , 2014

In this paper we address the nature, syntax and semantics of clitics. Our focus is on the syntax-semantics interface, since we will attempt to provide a model for interpretation of clitics and their associate constituents. We will address the problem of so-called “clitic doubling”, to see the semantic consequences that different syntactic configurations have, and investigate on how syntactic operations are triggered by the need to generate interface effects. We will put forth the thesis that clitics are procedural elements whose function is to license the presence of their associates and provide the semantic interface with instructions as to how to manipulate those sortal associates. Our argumentation will take elements from formal syntax (Radical Minimalism) and semantics-pragmatics (Relevance Theory) to configure an interface-based approach in which no phenomenon is studied in substantive isolation, but taking into account the interaction between different components of the system. Our aim is to provide prospects for a unified theory of the syntax-semantics of clitics, drawing on data from Spanish to support our theoretical claims. Keywords: Radical Minimalism; Relevance Theory; Clitic Doubling; Spanish; Case Marking

On the relation between V2 and the second position cliticization

Lingua, 2010

Following the standardly adopted hypothesis of a uniform diachronic source of V2 in Germanic and second position cliticization (2P), the paper investigates both operations in order to verify common claims concerning the motivation for the V2 and 2P movement. It shows that neither of them can be analyzed as a PF-driven phenomenon, nor is it possible to attribute them to a uniform syntactic trigger, such as Tense or Illocutionary Force feature checking. Special attention is given to the 2P effect in Slavic, whose properties show that it is necessary to draw a distinction between the ''generalized'' 2P, which is a syntactic process but seems unrelated to any feature checking mechanism, and Force-related 2P, which occurs for Force/Operator feature checking. The findings concerning 2P are applied to draw conclusions about the trigger of V2 in Germanic. It is argued that V2 covers a number of unrelated cases of movement or base generation, whose only common property is the position of the verb after the first constituent. Therefore, it seems incorrect to attribute all cases of V2 to a uniform syntactic trigger, in particular to Force marking. # This paper investigates possible links between the V2 requirement in Germanic and the second position cliticization (2P) in Slavic. The hypothesis that the two phenomena are related has a long tradition in linguistics, and dates back to Wackernagel's (1892) study of word order in early Indo European languages. Wackernagel observed that the word order was rather free in these languages, but a number of unrelated categories, such as pronouns, auxiliaries, adverbs and discourse particles, always appeared after the first word in the sentence. These elements behaved like clitics, as they were unaccented and occurred together forming clusters. Wackernagel declared that this was the basic word order rule in early Indo-European languages and tentatively suggested that it is reflected in contemporary languages, either in the form of second position cliticization (Wackernagel clitics), or the Verb Second rule in Germanic.

The rise and fall of second-position clitics

Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2005

Historical accounts of the phenomenon of cliticization have previously documented only the loss of second-position clitics. This paper argues that the history of Bulgarian offers evidence for the rise of a second-position clitic system. It is demonstrated that the second-position clitics of Old Bulgarian were not directly inherited from Indo-European, but emerged from a system of post-verbal clitics. The findings provide evidence against the position that independent historical laws govern 'natural' directions of language change. In particular, they challenge the belief in the uniform tendency for clitics to develop into inflectional affixes. Instead, the findings suggest that language change reflects competition between grammatical options, which instantiate principles and parameters of UG based on the properties of the learning algorithm and the nature of the linguistic input, and which are not intrinsically ranked. An analysis of the historical change that led to the development of second-position clitics in Old Bulgarian is proposed that implicates a switch in the parameter of headedness of TP. Clitics in both the old and new grammars are attracted by T 0 . A change in the position of T 0 relative to its complement triggers the reanalysis of clitics from pronominals forming a complex head with V 0 to pronominals moving to the left edge of TP. The non-branching status of clitics makes them category-ambiguous (D 0 /DP), which allows them to merge in the syntactic structure as either heads or maximal projections. The paper also traces the eventual loss of the second-position clitic system in Bulgarian and argues that changes in the grammar of phrasal movement, specifically the loss of topicalization to Spec,TP, trigger the syntactic reanalysis of clitics from arguments moved and adjoined to TP, into adjuncts to functional heads in the extended projection of V 0 , resulting in the modern pre-verbal clitic system.