Morphology of Clitic Pronouns in the Romance Languages

Abstract

Bound weak pronominals, such as French les in Je les ai vu(e)s ‘I have seen them’ or Italian lo in Giovanni lo vuole ‘John wants it’, are generally known in the literature as clitic pronouns. There are a number of reasons why it has been claimed that these forms behave more like affixes than like independent word forms. Among other aspects, it has been shown that the behavior of Romance clitic pronouns inside the clitic cluster is morphophonologically and morphotactically identical to that of affixes. Likewise, the fact that clitic pronouns both trigger non-productive allomorphy on the verb and undergo allomorphic variation indicates that clitic pronouns attach to the verb in the morphology rather than in the syntax. In this article, we survey the main morphological properties that have been previously documented for Romance clitic pronouns. We show that the Romance languages exhibit a variety of morphological idiosyncrasies and that such variation poses serious challenges to general syntactic principles. Having demonstrated the affixal nature of clitic systems, we then turn to more controversial aspects of clitic pronouns, namely clitic climbing with auxiliaries and complex predicates. These contexts, which pose interesting challenges to both morphology and syntax, have been commonly used to weaken the inflectional approach to clitic pronouns. We survey existing lexicalist accounts of clitic systems and show how the interaction between clitics and syntax can be captured within an inflectional analysis of clitic pronouns.