Cases of apparent enclisis on past participles in Romance varieties

Anna Cardinaletti

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.16

Abstract

This paper deals with cases of apparent enclisis on past participles in North-Western Italian varieties. It is claimed that these cases do not involve clitic pronouns, but weak pronouns in the sense of Cardinaletti and Starke (1999). Both syntactic and morphophonological evidence is discussed. Some varieties display both proclitics and postverbal weak pronouns and use them in different syntactic contexts. Other varieties lack clitic pronouns in their lexicon altogether and only display weak pronouns (alongside strong pronouns), similarly to what happens in e.g. Germanic languages.

Highlights

In most Romance languages, sentences with auxiliaries are contexts of obligatory clitic climbing: clitic pronouns do not attach to the past participle but occur in the high clitic position attached to the auxiliary: (1) a.* Ho vistolo. [I] have seen-him b
The data can be captured by the proposal that in these varieties, only one proclitic pronoun is possible with auxiliaries
The analysis provided here for the Borgomanerese dialect implies that this dialect does not possess clitic pronouns at all

Summary

Introduction

In most Romance languages, sentences with auxiliaries (e.g., active sentences with compound tenses and passive sentences) are contexts of obligatory clitic climbing: clitic pronouns do not attach to the past participle but occur in the high clitic position attached to the auxiliary:. This paper aims at showing that (3) and (4) can be analysed as apparent cases of enclisis on past participles They can be taken to involve weak pronouns (in the sense of Cardinaletti and Starke 1999), which are independent of the verb and are expectedly found in lower positions in the clause than clitic pronouns. Like all non-strong (or deficient) pronouns, Italian dative weak pronoun loro must move to the left to a position which precedes the direct object and may follow adverbs like mai ‘never’ (Cardinaletti 1991):. The different forms correspond to a different morphological internal structure Clitic pronouns such as Italian mi are taken to be monomorphemic elements and to contain an epenthetic vowel /i/ (cf Kayne 2000:135, Cardinaletti 2008, 2010). There is some evidence to argue that these pronouns are not clitic, but weak

Franco-Provençal Valdôtain dialects

Piedmontese dialects

Borgomanerese

Conclusions