Clitics

As a typical interface phenomenon, clitics have become increasingly important in linguistic theory during the last decade. The present book contributes to the recent discussion and first provides a comprehensive overview of clitic sequencing, clitic placement and clitic doubling in the major Romance languages. In addition, new data from a northern Italian dialect are introduced. The author then gives a critical summary of the current morphological analyses of clitic phenomena. She also discusses recent Optimality-theoretical analyses of clitic combinations and clitic placement and shows how these analyses can be improved upon when we also consider a morphological treatment of clitics. This book provides innovative solutions to clitic phenomena within the framework of a constraint-based morphological theory and will be of interest not only to morphologists, syntacticians and those working on the grammar of Romance languages, but also to linguists who are interested in the organisation of the grammar and the lexicon.