Clitic Placement Research Articles

Prosodically determined coordinator placement in Yorùbá

In this paper, we look at the properties of the clausal coordinator sì in Yorùbá. We will show that despite its unusual surface position in the middle field of the second conjunct, the element should still be treated as a proper coordinator and not, as sometimes claimed, as an adverb. We then go on to fully describe the distribution of sì in simple clauses as well as in complex constructions involving focus movement, adverbial or relative clauses. Based on these configurations, we argue that a search for a uniform syntactic position of sì is bound to be unsuccessful. Rather, we claim that the uniform underlying factor in all of these constructions is that sì always right-attaches to the first phonological phrase of the second conjunct clause irrespective of syntactic constituents or islands. We provide evidence for this claim from various phonological processes such as (i) phonological fusion, (ii) the association of floating tones, (iii) assimilation, (iv) tonal OCP-effects, and (v) allomorphy. The present study thus not only solves a curious language-specific puzzle in Yorùbá but also provides a convincing case of prosodically driven clitic displacement to a position after the first phonological/prosodic phrase. In doing so, it falls nicely into emerging typologies of clitic placement patterns in the world’s languages.

Under pressure: Exploring the impact of cognitive factors on clitics placement in L2 Slovak

Abstract This article investigates word order of clitics in L2 Slovak and the possible impact of cognitive factors on it. Based on data from the learner corpus, the article makes a first attempt at a more thorough inquiry of ordering patterns in the interlanguage of non-native speakers of Slovak to assess whether cognitive principles of contiguity, relevance, and verb–object bonding possibly have an effect on preferential clitics placement. As proxies for cognitive effects on word order, linguistic and (psycho)linguistic predictors are used, such as proficiency level to consider the possible developmental patterns of word order competence and L1 language group of speakers. The dataset includes 1,051 sentences with the annotated erroneous placement of clitics from learner corpus errkorp-1.0. The data are further annotated manually with respect to relevant variables (type of clitic component, syntactic environment in which this component occurs, expected and actual distance of clitic component from matrix verb in terms of linear dependency segments and syntactic words, actual and expected position of clitic component on right or left periphery of the matrix verb, and proficiency level according to CEFR and L1 language group of speakers). Correspondence analysis based on corpus data demonstrates the relevance of proficiency levels and the irrelevance of the L1 speaking group for preferential orders in the interlanguage. It is thus concluded that the interference hypothesis has little explanatory power for clitic placement in Slovak as L2. It is shown, however, that preferential ordering patterns in the interlanguage can be explained as being regulated by cognitive principles that operate irrespectively of L1.

On the acquisition of clitic placement in restructuring

This study investigates the production of clitic pronouns by monolingual Italian children aged 4;9-10;11, using a sentence repetition task including sentences with one or two restructuring verbs. The main findings are as follows: (i) children were more accurate with proclitics than enclitics, (ii) in their reproductions, they sometimes changed the clitic position and most often resorted to clitic climbing, to either the highest verb (in 2-verb sentences) or the intermediate verb (in 3-verb sentences), (iii) some instances of clitic reduplication were found, with similar tendencies as placement changes, (iv) no difference was observed between modal and motion verbs. These results show that restructuring is fully available to children and they prefer to produce monoclausal structures (Rizzi 1976, 1978/82; Cinque 2004) despite the long dependency established by clitic climbing. This in turn means that children’s grammar is guided by Structural Economy, like adults’ grammar. Children however assumed that restructuring verbs may be lexical less often than adults. Children never produced clitic misplacement errors, replicating previous findings on monolingual acquisition.

Istro-Romanian Subjunctive Clauses

This paper aims to define the featural composition of the complementizers that introduce subjunctive complements in Istro-Romanian, and to identify the internal organization of the subjunctive clause in terms of subject positions, verb movement, clitic placement and constituent fronting. In a nutshell, the observation is that the complementizer neca replaces se within the syntactic pattern of Old Romanian; that is, a pattern that displays intra- and inter-language variation with respect to the distribution of complementizers within the subjunctive CP. Tests of word order also indicate intra-language variation in the parametric settings for clitic placement (either high or low), for the argumental subject position (either in Spec,TP, yielding SVO, or in Spec,vP, yielding VSO) and for constituent movement under discourse triggers (either scrambling or fronting to CP).

Early acquisition of syntactic variation: Lexical conditioning of Spanish variable clitic placement

Abstract This paper examines how children acquire Spanish variable clitic placement (VCP), a lexically conditioned phenomenon whereby clitics may precede or follow complex verb phrases. Research on how children acquire truly syntactic variable phenomena suggests that they either generalize one variant initially or they match the variation in the input from the beginning. Here I examine how children acquire the lexical conditioning of Spanish VCP. A corpus study of naturalistic conversations between parents and young children suggests that from the earliest ages examined (2;0-3;0) children display lexically-specific patterns that seem to be fine-tuned by the early school years. Experimental results using two different elicitation techniques with children ages 4;0-7;0 provide further support for early acquisition of the lexical conditioning of VCP and some evidence for fine-tuning during this age window. Thus, methodological triangulation enables detection of variable use where children would otherwise show categorical use of variants with infrequent syntactic phenomena, such as Spanish VCP.

(In)aceitabilidade do padrão de colocação dos pronomes clíticos no português brasileiro por falantes escolarizados

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.

Colocação de clíticos em PE L2

This study investigates the acquisition of clitic placement in L2 EP, using an elicited oral production task and a speeded acceptability judgement task. Participants were 20 L1 EP speakers and 30 L1 Spanish-L2 EP adult learners at intermediate to near-native levels. Results show that enclisis stabilizes early (at least in production) and proclisis develops sequentially, following a route similar to that observed in L1 acquisition: Negation > Subjunctive complement clauses > Indicative complement clauses > Adverbial clauses, quantified subjects. The contexts that develop later are the less categorical ones in native grammars, which may give rise to greater input variability and add complexity to the acquisition task. As a result, learners need prolonged input exposure to discover the patterns of clitic placement in EP. Full convergence with the target language seems to be possible, but only at a near-native level.

Clitic placement at the syntax‐phonology interface: A case study of Berber*

AbstractBerber1 clitics are argued to follow the main verb but may appear in a position preceding the verb in the presence of a Complementiser, Negation or Tense. However, there are cases involving a subset of these categories yet the clitics still follow the verb. In this article, it is argued that neither syntax nor phonology alone can handle the full range of clitic alternations. Instead, the placement of these clitics is claimed to involve both syntax and phonology. It is argued that these clitics undergo syntactic movement from a lower position to the left of the verb for licensing purposes. However, clitics in some syntactically well‐formed positions may still be ill‐formed due to prosodic considerations. Assuming copy theory of movement, the variable positioning of clitics is attributed to the spell‐out of different copies in the movement chain, thus obviating the need for phonological movement.

Defectivity Matters: Cliticization in French Causatives Revisited

On the basis of revised syntactic structures for the French faire-causatives, this article argues that the placement of various clitics in these causatives can be accounted for by making reference to the feature defectivity/completeness of clitics and that of their host. I show that the faire-à construction involves a biclausal structure, where the raised causativized v in the embedded clause is defective and activates the object to prepose. In addition, I identify four types of clitics with respect to their feature contents, which are licensed by different applications of three syntactic dependency operations: Agree-match, Agree-value, and Agree-check.

Imperatives in Heritage Spanish: Lexical Access and Lexical Frequency Effects

Along with declaratives and interrogatives, imperatives are one of the three major clause types of human language. In Spanish, imperative verb forms present poor morphology, yet complex syntax. The present study examines the acquisition of (morpho)syntactic properties of imperatives in Spanish among English-speaking heritage speakers of Spanish. With the use of production and acceptability judgment tasks, this study investigates the acquisition of verb morphology and clitic placement in canonical and negative imperatives. The results indicate that the acquisition of Spanish imperatives among heritage speakers is shaped by the heritage speakers’ productive vocabulary knowledge, lexical frequency and syntactic complexity. Indeed, most of the variability in their knowledge was found in their production of negative imperatives: heritage speakers show a rather stable receptive grammatical knowledge while their production shows signs of variability modulated by the heritage speakers’ productive vocabulary knowledge and by the lexical frequency of the verb featured in the test items.

Clitic Placement and the Grammaticalization of the Future and the Conditional in Old Catalan

The romance future and conditional tenses are the result of the grammaticalization of Latin periphrasis, mainly cantāre habeō. In some medieval Romance languages, including Catalan, two types of forms existed: synthetic forms (faré ‘I will do’) and analytical forms (fer-lo he ‘I will do it’). Analytical forms do not present univerbation and are thus less grammaticalized than synthetic forms. The present work aims to study the distribution of synthetic and analytical forms diachronically. A diachronic corpus (11th c.–16th c.) was compiled to serve this purpose. According to the syntactic restrictions of clitic placement, analytical forms could appear in the same syntactic environments than synthetic forms with postverbal pronouns (faré-lo ‘I will do it’). Therefore, only those contexts are analysed to assess the degree of grammaticalization. Some recent works point out that the grammaticalization of future and conditional was more advanced in the eastern languages of the Iberian Peninsula, such as Catalan, than in the western ones. The results from our corpus confirm these differences. In addition, the data show another grammaticalization process: the evolution of clitic placement towards a fixed preverbal position.

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

New considerations for variable clitic placement in Spanish

AbstractThe current study examines variable clitic placement (CP) in Spanish in a Mexican community in the metropolitan Atlanta area. By employing sociolinguistic interview data from 20 first-generation Mexican speakers, clitic frequencies and constraints are analyzed. Tokens of proclisis and enclisis were coded for linguistic and social factors that potentially influence clitic usage (e.g., topic persistence, specific clitic used, English proficiency, age, gender), and a logistic regression analysis was carried out usingRbrul(Daniel Johnson, 2009). Results indicate a proclisis rate of 64%, which is comparable to other varieties of Mexican Spanish. The regression analysis revealed that CP is sensitive to the particular construction used, the specific clitic, the presence of a pause, and the speaker’s gender. Additionally, English proficiency showed no effect on CP. This analysis supports previous research that CP is impermeable to contact-induced change and also reveals new conditioning factors (specific clitic, presence of a pause) that have not been examined in previous literature.

Towards the Definition of the Bulgarian Word Order System

The world’s languages with clitic clusters pattern with four major types of the word order systems, depending on the presence or absence of the 2P condition and the parameter of clitic-verb adjacency. Bulgarian has a double-focus system of clitic placement (2P condition and clitic-verb adjacency), which has typological parallels outside Europe but lacks direct counterparts in modern European languages. Neither the analogy with standard 2P languages without clitic-verb adjacency nor the analogy with the Romance systems with vP-internal clitics captures the profile of the Bulgarian clitic syntax. Historically, the rise of the clitic-verb adjacency is an innovation of Bulgarian, but its exact time and triggers are unclear. The language of the Wallachian letters (ca. 1386-1509) has a marked tendency towards the clitic-verb adjacency and is typologically similar to Modern Bulgarian but still has residual #XP – CL – [Y] – V orders. This idiom spoken by the L2 speakers of Middle Bulgarian cannot be viewed as a source of the Modern Bulgarian but hints that the clitic-verb adjacency parameter could develop in the history of Bulgarian because of the contact influence on the part of some Non-Slavic clitic systems.

Language-Internal Reanalysis of Clitic Placement in Heritage Grammars Reduces the Cost of Computation: Evidence from Bulgarian

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.

Clitic placement in Cypriot Greek

Η παρούσα μeλέτη διeρeύνησe τα κλιτικά και τη θέση τους σe σχέση μe το ρήμα στη σύγχρονη κυπριακή eλληνική (ΚE), η οποία υφίσταται ομογeνοποίηση και ισοπέδωση τοπικών υπο-ποικιλιών. Συγκeκριμένα, διeρeυνήθηκe η αποδοχή της απροσδόκητης πρόκλισης μέσω eνός διαδικτυακού eρωτηματολογίου μe 74 συμμeτέχοντeς. Οι παράγοντeς που eξeτάστηκαν ήταν η μορφοσύνταξη του ρήματος, το συντακτικό πeριβάλλον που προηγeίται του κλιτικού, το γραμματικό πρόσωπο, καθώς και το φύλο και η ηλικία των συμμeτeχόντων. Τα κύρια eυρήματα ήταν ότι το φύλο καθορίζeι την αποδοχή της απροσδόκητης πρόκλισης, μe τις γυναίκeς να την αποδέχονται πeρισσότeρο οδηγώντας έτσι στην αλλαγή.

On “free” grammatical variation in a mixed lect: Clitic placement in Cypriot Greek

AbstractVariation involving a switch between pre- and post-verbal placement of pronominal object clitics in a single syntactic environment within a language is unexpected. The rationale why this would not be expected is clear: Languages pattern as either proclitic or enclitic with respect to object clitic placement, possibly allowing one or the other option across different syntactic environments. We provide an overview of our research from data collected in Cyprus, related to the development and use of pronominal object clitics for child populations and adult speakers that are bilectal in Cypriot and Standard Modern Greek. While it has been shown that the tested bilectal populations receive exposure to more than one distinct grammar, including mixed grammars with optional choices for clitic placement, an important question remains unaddressed: Is variation really “free” across all speakers or are there universally reliable predictors (such as gender, age, or level of education) that mediate a consistent use of either the standard or the dialect? Combining insights from targeted elicitation tasks administered to different groups, a corpus of spontaneous speech, and an extensive literature review, we show the weakness of such purported predictors and support a claim of free variation.

Left Branch Extraction and Clitic Placement in Gaulish

The inscriptional remains of Gaulish preserve syntactic behaviours that are not expected from the perspective of the diachronic schemes usually posited for the development of early Insular Celtic syntax from Proto-Indo-European. Widespread evidence is attested, particularly for the behaviour of clitics, that does not seem reconcilable with many of the assumptions made in previous studies regarding the nature of the syntax of Proto-Celtic. Gaulish also evidently features scrambling-type phenomena such as left branch extraction that are not usually thought to appear in other Celtic languages. An analysis which begins with an assessment of these features leads to a more empirically predicated and consistent understanding of the early development of Celtic word order than has been proffered previously.

Pequeno livro do desassossego sociolinguístico

O episódio da mesóclise cometida pelo Ex-Presidente Michel Temer no seu discurso de posse é o ponto de partida para pensar a relação entre as categorias tradicionais por meio das quais se trabalha o significado social no campo da sociolinguística – como prestígio ou identidade – e a dimensão política da linguagem. A hipótese central é a de que categorias tradicionais da sociolinguística não são suficientes para explicar os efeitos de sentido presentes no uso da colocação pronominal na fala do presidente. De fato, é preciso lançar mão dos efeitos de memória incrustados nas construções sintáticas, e para explicá-los é necessário voltar à crise normativa do final do século XIX, que coincide com a instauração do regime republicano no Brasil. Nesse sentido, é notável como a colocação pronominal emerge em vários momentos significativos da história do Brasil, como um sintoma fundamental da relação entre ordem e desordem, barbárie e civilização, nos nossos projetos de nacionalidade.

Efeitos de dominância linguística e de tempo de exposição formal à língua na produção de pronomes clíticos por crianças bilingues português/francês

This study investigates the effects of two external linguistic variables – language dominance and time of formal exposure – on the production and placement of clitic pronouns of Portuguese-French bilingual children. Using two elicited production tasks and a parental sociolinguistic questionnaire, we show that language dominance plays a role in rates of omission and rates of clitic production. On the other hand, a higher time of formal exposure to Portuguese does not determine better performance neither in what concerns clitic omission nor clitic placement in Portuguese-French bilingual children.