Clitic placement and the Anti-V2 effect in European Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese prioritizes pre-verbal placement (proclisis) of its clitic pronouns. However, post-verbal placement (enclisis) has not been completely excluded from this variety, being acquired by means of schooling. This study aimed at evaluating the acceptability of both these possible clitic placements in sentences with and without proclisis triggers – elements that, according to the normative tradition (based on European Portuguese, whose clitic placement pattern is syntacticly restrained), give rise to proclisis (whereas enclisis obtains at their absence) – by means of an acceptability judgement test with a six-point scale carried out by 79 Brazilian Portuguese native speakers who had completed, at least, Secondary School. The results showed that, even though the items with proclisis have been better evaluated than the ones with enclisis, the enclitic placement was evaluated above the central point of the scale used in this study, indicating that it is, as well, an acceptable placement for those speakers. It is concluded that, although the classes regarding clitic placement revolve around teaching the students similar rules to those found in the European Portuguese syntax, it does not seem to allow them to develop the syntactic knowledge specific to proclisis and enclisis, probably because Brazilian Portuguese is the oral variety used in the classrooms and the clitic placement rules (and their application) are restricted to the written modality.

Cast in Functional Grammar (FG), this chapter considers the syntactic placement of pronominal clitics in European Portuguese (EP), contrasting these with comparable phenomena in Castilian Spanish (CS). It emerges that EP constituent order results from the interplay of (at least) a single, minimally specified structural pattern, a principle of increasing syntactic weight, and the independently required principles of restrictive apposition and adverbial insertion. The specific difference between EP and CS reduces to the insight that EP allows placement of the verb in clause-initial position, whereas this is excluded in CS; verb position determines the occurrence of proclisis and enclisis, which we analyse as syntactic rather than morphological in EP. The chapter illustrates the applicability of FG to the comparison of languages.

This paper discusses the peculiar ability of certain deictic locatives (like lá ‘there’) to appear left-adjacent to the verb in European Portuguese. We propose that leftward movement of lá (and similar deictic locatives) is middle scrambling, understood as movement to Spec,TP. In order to explain why lá-preposing to Spec,TP is not always permitted, we elaborate on the hypothesis of Costa & Martins (2003, 2004) that in EP the strong nature of the polarity-encoding head Σ requires it to be ‘lexicalized’ either by syntactic merger or by morphological merger under adjacency. Middle scrambling is barred whenever Σ and V must be adjacent. The analysis derives the particular syntax of the deictic locatives (in different clausal structures, including restructuring infinitives) and its puzzling parallelism with clitic placement. Finally, we suggest that speaker/utterance-anchorage is what links together deictic locatives and tense, enabling the former to enter the syntactic domain of the latter.

Cliticization in European Portuguese (EP) is unique amongst other Romance languages. While preverbal and postverbal placement of clitics is common, it is defined by the finiteness of the verb. In EP, however, the clitic placement does not depend on the verb, but on the context surrounding it. In this paper, we present an operational construction grammar model for parsing and production of proclitic contexts.

In most Romance languages, object clitics appear to the left of the verb (proclitics); in European Portuguese (henceforth, EP) they appear to the right (enclitics). Furthermore, several syntactic environments trigger proclisis in EP, which usually have no effect on clitic placement in other Romance languages. These environments can be roughly split into two categories: those in which CP is filled (Wh-questions, focus constructions, subordinate clauses), and those in which a head position between CP and TP is filled (negation, special adverbs). To account for this, I propose that C0in EP has the strong feature [+lexical] which must be checked by a lexical item before Spell-Out. I also propose the following clause structure: TopP>CP>AdvsP>NegP>TP>vP>VP. AdvsP is a functional projection which hosts any one of a small set of special adverbials. If CP is filled by Spell-Out (either in its head or specifier position), the [+lexical] feature will be checked and erased. If not, then C0attracts the closest lexical item.

This paper reports a study on the acquisition of clitic placement by European Portuguese children aged 5, 6 and 7, using an elicitation task. Contrarily to what has been found for other languages, where children correctly place clitic pronouns from a very early age, our results show that European Portuguese children still misplace clitics at age 7, although there is a developmental effect from 5 to 7: they overuse enclisis in proclisis contexts, but not the other way round. This confirms previous studies based on spontaneous production. Our study shows, however, that: i) the rates of clitic misplacement are not identical in all proclisis contexts; ii) proclisis is acquired earlier in some contexts; iii) the contexts that are harder to acquire are the ones where we find more variability in the adult control group, and where diachronic data are not so categorical. We argue that, since clitic placement in European Portuguese is not linked to the finite/non finite distinction, there is a slower developmental path, reflecting the complexity of the input and the specific properties of lexical items and syntactic contexts.

This research is based on the investigation of clitic placement in Portuguese, since this a factor of great importance to identify grammatical differences between Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP), acknowledged since the eighteenth century. The main aim is to verify whether there is any specific characteristic on the texts from the so called black press that distinguishes them from the major press from the period. And, then, confirm that the differences between the Brazilian and European variants exist not only superficially, but also in their inner grammar features. While EP has become a language that prefers enclitic placement, BP is the most proclitic of all romance languages. Hence, two newspapers have been analyzed: One of them, named O Patrocnio (1925)(1926)(1927)(1928)(1929)(1930), represents the so black press, and the other one, called Gazeta de Piracicaba (1882Piracicaba ( -1937) ) is from the major press. Newspapers consist of different text genres, thus this data contains different and particular features among the same paper. In this context, the analysis of a black press newspaper is particularly interesting once the texts were mainly written by afro-descendents people, to afro-descendents. Therefore, the language that was actually used by the people at that time was expected to be found. However, the social and historical aspects of the period showed that, somehow, the main writers of these papers had access to the normative grammar of the language. So, as their purpose was to fit in the society of the period, they tried to maintain, in their texts, what was considered to be the correct grammar at the time. Hence, when the data from both papers was compared, it was verified that they have a very similar clitic placement. That is, both of them present the standard European placement along with the Brazilian placement with very similar percentages.

This paper argues that the variation in the placement of clitic pronouns in European and Brazilian Portuguese follows from the interaction of two properties in regard of which these two languages differ. One is syntactic: EP clitics are Infl-clitics and BP clitics are V-clitics. The other is morpho-phonological: EP clitics, but not BP clitics, are required to be in a non-initial position with respect to some boundary. Our analysis is illustrated by the comparison between the original version of Paulo Coelho’s novel O Alquimista, and the European adaptation of the text published in Portugal. We claim that our analysis is preferable to others for both empirical and theoretical reasons. In fact, we try to prove that it is able to explain EP clitic-placement in both tensed and infinitival clauses and to account for the variation observed in some contexts. We also bring historical data into the discussion, which we argue can be harmoniously integrated into our explanation of the synchronic facts.

Among Italian verbs that co-occur with short and long clitic placement, we will analyse those traditionally called "aspectual" and "movement" verbs. However, our treatment of long clitic placement is firstly exemplified using modal verbs. This treatment is quite different from Rizzi's, because the verbs that trigger long clitic placement are considered to be auxiliairies. The verbs that are the main object of this article present some peculiarities not to be found in the case of modals, such as the preposition before the infinitive and the possible complement of a movement verb. Our treatment of the first of these two points is closely linked to the analysis of the verbal locution avere da~ infinitive which we will present in detail. Both this locution and the possible complement of movement verbs represent new data with respect of the syntax of long clitic placement. Some remarks on the idiosyncrasies of the verbs in question when occuring with long clitic placement precede a more detailed comparison of the restructuring hypothesis with the auxiliary one.

The study offers novel evidence on the grammar and processing of clitic placement in heritage languages. Building on earlier findings of divergent clitic placement in heritage European Portuguese and Serbian, this study extends this line of inquiry to Bulgarian, a language where clitic placement is subject to strong prosodic constraints. We found that, in heritage Bulgarian, clitic placement is processed and rated differently than in the baseline, and we asked whether such clitic misplacement results from the transfer from the dominant language or follows from language-internal reanalysis. We used a self-paced listening task and an aural acceptability rating task with 13 English-dominant, highly proficient heritage speakers and 22 monolingual speakers of Bulgarian. Heritage speakers of Bulgarian process and rate the grammatical proclitic and ungrammatical enclitic clitic positions as equally acceptable, and we contend that this pattern is due to language-internal reanalysis. We suggest that the trigger for such reanalysis is the overgeneralization of the prosodic Strong Start Constraint from the left edge of the clause to any position in the sentence.

This chapter argues that some of the linguistic particularities of heritage grammars can be ascribed to the amplification of variation that is present in the input to heritage speakers. Our argumentation is based on studies on European Portuguese as a heritage language acquired in contact with German (and other environmental languages). Three different dimensions of linguistic variation are taken into consideration: variation caused by linguistic complexity (exemplified through clitic placement), variation caused by ongoing diachronic development (exemplified through null objects), and variation caused by lexical and/or grammatical ambiguity (expressed by the interpretation of overt subject pronouns; and multiple functions of the element que). We conclude that phenomena detected in heritage languages, which could at first sight be interpreted as deviant, are often a predictable outcome of variation in the input.

In the context of lexicalist studies of Romance cliticisation, the development and rigorous application of diagnostic criteria (Zwicky and Pullum 1983; Miller 1992) for determining the lexical or syntactic status of linguistic items has always enjoyed a central role. As a result, there is a vast body of evidence in French and Italian (Miller 1992; Miller and Sag 1997; Monachesi 1996) that weak pronominals in these languages resemble ordinary bound affixes much more than true postlexical clitics. In particular, syntactic, semantic, morphological, and phonological criteria jointly militate against the view of Romance clitics as proper inhabitants of the syntactic world. As a side effect, the distinction between lexical affixes and postlexical clitics (Halpern 1995) is seen as a strict dichotomy, with little or no room for true morpho-syntactic hybrids. I will argue in this paper that transitional types do indeed occur, which are characterised by the fact that one group of criteria (e.g. morphological criteria) positively suggest syntactic opacity, while almost all syntactic criteria demand a degree of transparency. Based on data from clitic placement and coordination in European Portuguese (EP), I will suggest that the syntactic transparency is highly superficial in nature, and thus favours an account in terms of word order variation. This perspective, together with the fundamental distinction drawn within recent HPSG between constituent structure and linearisation will also prove capable of making appropriate predictions in the context of semantic idiosyncrasies.

This book contains fourteen articles that reflect current ideas on the phonology, morphology, and syntax of clitics. It covers the forms and functions of clitics in various typologically diverse languages and presents data from, e.g. European Portuguese, Macedonian, and Yoruba. It extensively deals with the prosodic structure of clitics, their morphological status, clitic placement, and clitic doubling. The form and behavior of clitics with respect to tonal phenomena and in verse are discussed in two articles (Akinlabi & Liberman, Reindl & Franks). Other articles address the prosodic representation of clitics in Irish (Green), the differences in the acquisition of clitics and strong pronouns in Catalan (Escobar & Gavarro), the similarities between clitics and affixes or words in Romance and Bantu languages (Cocchi, Crysmann, Monachesi, Ortman & Popescu), the semantics of clitics in the Greek DP and in Spanish doubling (Alexiadou & Stavrou, Uriagereka), and complex problems concerning verbal clitics in Romanian and Balkan languages (Legendre, Spencer, Tomic).

This chapter is an early attempt to come to terms with the complex cliticization patterns in European Portuguese, which mainly differ from that of other Romance languages in that enclisis is the rule in “neutral” affirmative declarative finite tensed clauses. At first sight, the enclisis/proclisis divide in European Portuguese appears to be directly correlated to the “height” of the functional category hosting the finite verb. The author argues that the host category cannot be C. A specific proposal is made, concerning the categorial architecture above IP, the syntactic space that today is referred to as the “left periphery.” It postulates the existence of a special head W between the IP and the CP systems, which coincides with the Wackernagel position often resorted to in the analysis of Germanic light elements and distinct from the Focus position which had been introduced in recent work by Brody (1990). Because of its feature endowment, W has the capacity to host Clitics and to Attract the finite verb. But the V-feature, which is checked via verb-raising in enclisis structures, is checked via another strategy in proclisis structure.

This chapter attempts to explain certain robust aspects of (diachronic) syntactic variation in Portuguese, focusing specifically on Brazilian Portuguese (BP), especially regarding verb movement and clitic placement. Analysing these phenomena is especially relevant for the evaluation of theories of diachronic and parametric syntactic variation in Romance and other languages. The chapter is organized as follows. First, it summarizes a possible analysis of the properties that distinguish different Romance languages regarding the placement of clitics. Second, it argues that BP lost V movement to a position higher than the inflectional head. It shows that the loss of V movement in BP had different consequences in BP, especially in the placement of clitics. The chapter addresses the question of possible triggers for the kinds of change that took place in BP. It concludes by discussing other aspects of the change in clitic placement that took place in BP.