‘V2’ and clitic placement

Abstract

AbstractIn medieval Romance, as well as in present-day western Ibero-Romance, enclisis and proclisis alternate in finite main positive clauses. Such alternations are usually subsumed under the so-called Tobler-Mussafia law, which has been subject to several reformulations in order to relate clitic placement to other syntactic properties. This chapter shows that the hypothesis linking enclisis and verb movement is ultimately correct, although the examples supporting the hypothesis are relatively rare, the correlation between enclisis and verb movement is a bit more complicated than assumed in part of the literature, and no formal machinery proposed so far accounts adequately for clitic placement. This chapter endorses Benincà’s (1995, 2006) hypothesis, according to which the verb moves in two steps, yielding, respectively, subject inversion and V2 orders, when the verb targets a lower position in the left periphery, and enclisis, when the verb climbs higher.