Romance Object Clitics: Microvariation and Linguistic Change (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics)

✍ Scribed by Diego Pescarini

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 353
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book offers an empirical and theoretical exploration of the development of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages, drawing on data from Latin, medieval vernaculars, modern Romance languages, and lesser-known dialects. Diego Pescarini examines phonological, morphological, and especially syntactic aspects of Romance object clitics, using the findings to reconstruct their evolution from Latin to Romance and to model clitic placement in modern Romance languages. On the theoretical side, the volume engages with previous accounts of clitics, particularly in generative theory. It challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency; instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which initially caused freezing of certain pronominal forms and then - through reanalysis - their successive incorporation to verbal hosts. This approach leads to a revision of earlier analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, climbing, and enclisis/proclisis alternations, and to new approaches to issues including V2 syntax, scrambling, and stylistic fronting, among many others.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Romance Object Clitics: Microvariation and Linguistic Change
Copyright
Contents
Series preface
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
Part I: Setting the Scene
Chapter 1: Properties of Romance object clitics
1.1 Definitions
1.2 Phonology
1.3 Morphology
1.4 Syntax
1.4.1 The position of clitics in the clause
1.4.2 The position of clitics with respect to the verb
1.4.3 The position of clitics with respect to other clitics
1.5 Conclusion
Chapter 2: Theoretical preliminaries
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Dependencies
2.3 Domains
2.4 Nesting
2.5 Criteria
2.6 Conclusion
Chapter 3: Historical overview
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Latin
3.3 Late Latin
3.4 Clitics in the earliest texts (eighth–ninth century)
3.5 Archaic Early Romance
3.6 Innovative Early Romance
3.7 The loss of enclisis
3.8 The rebirth of enclisis
3.9 Non-finite clauses
3.10 Clitic clusters
3.11 The loss of clitics?
3.12 Conclusion
Part II: Deficiency
Chapter 4: Syntactic evidence against deficiency
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Weak pronouns
4.3 Doubling and resumption
4.4 Climbing
4.5 Other syntactic properties of clitic (vs weak) elements
4.5.1 Adjacency to V
4.5.2 Complement of P
4.5.3 First position of V2 clauses
4.5.4 Person Case Constraint
4.5.5 Omission under coordination
4.6 Conclusion
Chapter 5: Morphophonological evidence against deficiency
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Morphological layering
5.3 Stress and proclisis/enclisis asymmetries
5.4 Conclusion
Part III: The Emergence of Clitics
Chapter 6: Clitics in embryo
6.1 Introduction
6.2 On the nature of the Wackernagel Position
6.3 The Wackernagel Criterion
6.4 Productive interpolation
6.5 Conclusion
Chapter 7: The rise of adverbal clitics
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Evidence of incorporation
7.3 Modelling incorporation
7.4 The loss of interpolation
7.5 The locus of interpolation (and incorporation)
7.6 Conclusion
Part IV: Early Romance
Chapter 8: ‘V2’ and clitic placement
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Types of inversion
8.3 The Romance V2: truth or hoax?
8.4 Inversion and VP scrambling
8.5 Embedding
8.6 Interim conclusion
8.7 Verb movement and clitic placement
8.7.1 Modelling verb movement, inversion, and enclisis
8.7.2 Archaic Early Romance
8.7.3 Innovative Early Romance
8.7.4 Against the Edge Principle
8.7.5 Section conclusion
8.8 Conclusion
Chapter 9: Deriving enclisis in ‘V1’ clauses
9.1 Introduction
9.2 The Focus Criterion
9.3 The disruption of incorporation
9.4 Dummies
9.5 Stylistic Fronting and mesoclisis
9.6 Polarity
9.7 Conclusion
Part V: Towards Microvariation
Chapter 10: Clitic climbing
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Restructuring
10.3 Modelling the interaction of restructuring and climbing
10.4 Destructuring: periphrastic constructions
10.5 Destructuring: compound tenses
10.6 Destructuring and V2
10.6.1 Simple tenses
10.6.2 Periphrases
10.7 Conclusion
Chapter 11: Clitic combinations
11.1 Introduction
11.2 Accounts of clitic clusters
11.3 The emergence of the mirror order
11.4 Properties of split combinations vs clusters in Italian
11.4.1 Separability
11.4.2 Allomorphy
11.5 Suppletion
11.5.1 Ibero-Romance
11.5.2 Italo-Romance
11.5.3 Gallo-Romance
11.5.4 Irregularities as cues
11.6 Conclusion
Chapter 12: Conclusion
List of primary sources
References
Language Index
Name Index
Subject Index
Back Matter Series Page