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This chapter begins by distinguishing simple clitics — referring to a purely phonological dimension of clitic-hood — from special clitics in more or less the sense of Zwicky (1977). It considers two systems that might be taken to illustrate simple clitics, whose behaviour can later be compared and contrasted with that of morphosyntactically unusual special clitics. The first of these is a set of clitic elements from the Wakashan language K^wak^w'ala, whose properties (while initially remarkable in some respects) are relatively straightforward. The second case considered yields a rather more complex story, however. It has become fairly common to cite English contracted auxiliary forms such as the 's in Nixon's the one as near canonical instances of simple clitics.

Among the various types of special clitics, by far the most interesting (in the sense of probative) are those that occur in second position within the domain to which they are relevant. This chapter shows why these clitics are so important for the development of an adequate theory of special clitic positioning. Proceeding from a fuller account of the K^wak^w'ala clitics considered earlier, it explores second-position clitics in a variety of languages. It considers a range of possible theories that have been proposed for the positioning of special clitics, and concludes that neither the syntax nor the phonology suffices to describe the grammar of special clitics — a result that is of course entirely in accord with this book's earlier proposal that the nature of these elements is essentially morphological.

This chapter surveys some of the substantive syntactic properties of the most widely studied class of clitics, those traditionally analysed as pronominals. It begins by examining the nature of (predicate-argument) agreement, comparing it with well-known phenomena arising in the analysis of special clitics. This requires an elaboration of the analysis of the Morphosyntactic Representations of categories to account for phenomena such as (the presence versus absence versus optionality of) clitic doubling, clitic climbing, and the like. While the bulk of the literature devoted to pronominal clitics focuses on object clitics, some languages (including several spoken in northern Italy and in nearby areas of Switzerland) also have special clitics referring to subjects. Their properties are explored, including those of Surmiran and a range of northern Italian dialects. The significance of the morphological approach to special clitics for the syntax of functional categories and the proposal that all such categories constitute syntactically autonomous heads (each with its own projection) in syntactic representation are discussed.

This chapter discusses the gaps in some of the combinations of the preverbal clitics in French. These gaps present a powerful tool for evaluating the foundational hypothesis governing the architecture of the language, particularly the morphophonology-free syntax (MFS) of the language. In the French clitic cluster, the gaps are divided into two categories: the syntactic groups and non-syntactic groups. The syntactic groups invoke syntactic information. The non-syntactic groups meanwhile are comprised of gaps invisible to syntax and dependent on morphophonological information and mechanisms. Also discussed in the chapter is the Person Case Constraint, a syntactic principle that forms the foundation against which other gaps may be measured. Some anomalous combinations are also discussed in the chapter. These combinations betray the workings of the extra-syntactic system which manipulates the morphological features and which imposes constraints on such combinations.

Minimalism reevaluates the division of labor between syntax and PF; much traditionally syntactic is actually a response to Spell–Out demands. This paper examines largely Slavic phenomena caused by Spell–out exigencies of (i) imposition of linear order on syntactically concatenated elements, (ii) determination of which copy to pronounce, and (iii) prosodification.

This chapter discusses microcomparative syntax in the form of a review of a 1994 collection of essays by Paola Benincà, whose work has shown how Italian dialect syntax can provide an invaluable window on aspects of universal grammar (UG) that might have gone unnoticed in work restricted to the best-known Romance languages. Although the discussion is limited to Romance, the point clearly extends to other families as well. The extent to which closely related dialects can vary in their syntax is widely underestimated. Benincà's work has, over the past twenty or so years, contributed substantially toward rectifying that misapprehension.

To say that one sense of the term ‘clitic’ is to be identified with the phonology of the relevant elements does not, of course, actually provide in itself a theory of that dimension. In fact, the phonology of cliticization is closely bound up with the nature and status of the much broader theory of prosodic structure in language, and we can only understand phonological clitics by placing their behaviour within this larger context. This chapter outlines a view of prosodic categories and their relations within the framework of Optimality Theory, and uses it to arrive at a characterization of the phonology of clitics, especially (but not exclusively) in English. It is argued that the properties of English reduced auxiliaries do indeed fall within a phonological account, and thus that there is no obstacle to calling them ‘simple’ clitics in the technical sense, despite the complexities of their behaviour.

This chapter focuses on the morphosyntax of special clitics. Starting from the classic descriptive generalizations of Zwicky, Klavans, Kaisse, and others about the locations in which these are found, the chapter asks what kind of theory might be responsible for getting them there. The chapter concludes that morphology and not syntax furnishes the appropriate context for understanding them. Special clitics, that is, constitute a morphology of phrases — a suggestion that has often been made.

This chapter elaborates a more precise account of the phrasal morphology that is responsible for the appearance of special clitics, within an Optimality Theoretic framework. A limited set of constraint types suffice to describe these concisely and insightfully. The OT-based account of ‘Clitics as Phrasal Affixes’ is compared with a variety of other theories: those postulating a purely syntactic account of cliticization, and those locating the unusual properties of special clitics in their phonology or in other properties of the interface between syntax and other parts of grammar. The system of second-position clitics in Tagalog provides a complex and nuanced example displaying a number of the properties discussed to this point.

This chapter poses the question of whether or not it was correct for Jakob Wackernagel — whose classic discussion of second-position clitics in the earliest Indo-European languages has been so often cited — to suggest a connection between these clitics and another set of second-position phenomena, the verb-second regularities of Modern German and a number of other languages. It argues that while Wackernagel's own notion of the explanatory connection was undoubtedly incorrect, there is indeed a deep link, and the morphosyntactic apparatus used to describe second-position clitics can provide an account of verb second in German, Icelandic, Breton, and other languages.

This chapter describes how natural coordination is expressed in co-compounds and phrase-like tight coordination. Different types of markedness are discussed, including formal, distinctive, structural, local, typological, and textual markedness. Marking strategies for natural coordination can deviate in several respects from ordinary coordination, all of which can be accounted for by two conflicting relationships of iconicity: minimal distance and symmetry. The phenomena of phonological-syntactic non-isomorphism in the syntax of coordination are discussed, putting them into a broader context of similar phenomena in related domains of syntax, such as clitics, phrasal affixes, and group inflection.

This chapter deals with the third and final type of degrammaticalization. Debonding is defined as ‘a change whereby a bound morpheme in a specific linguistic context becomes a free morpheme’. Like deinflectionalization, debonding involves bound morphemes, but where in deinflectionalization grams remain bound and gain a new function or meaning, in debonding affixes and clitics become free morphemes and do not necessarily gain a new function or meaning. Debonding can be said to comprise two subtypes, since inflectional affixes and clitics on the one hand and derivational affixes on the other behave slightly differently. Examples include infinitival markers, connective particles becoming free connectives, and numeral suffixes becoming quantifiers.

This chapter focuses on the fact that in certain dialects of Dutch the polarity markers yes and no can be accompanied by subject clitics and/or agreement suffixes. Just as in the previous chapter, there are many empirical similarities between this construction and Short Do Replies. This chapter argues that the structure underlying conjugated instances of yes and no is in fact a Short Do Reply that has been PF-deleted. As such, this construction combines PF-deletion and pro. The chapter also provides an account for the absence of clitics and (complementizer) agreement endings under sluicing.

Arnold Zwicky has identified two kinds of clitics: Simple clitics and special clitics. A logically quite distinct dimension of cliticization is addressed in numerous studies that focus on elements such as the weak or conjunct pronominal forms of the Romance languages. The distinction between simple and special clitic elements implies two mutually exclusive dimensions of clitic behavior related to phonologyl and morphosyntax. Tagalog, a dialect of the Philippines, displays clitic elements with two different functions, each of which follows the first element of the sentence. This chapter, which examines the system of “second position” clitics in Tagalog, first provides an overview of the theory of second position before turning to the specific properties of the Tagalog clitics.

This chapter focuses on morphology and examines its interaction with phonology and syntax using Romance cliticization as a test case. To demonstrate the complexity of the phenomenon, it shows in detail the phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties of Romance cliticization. It suggests a lexical analysis which views Romance clitics as having morphological elements. Various approaches to morphology are considered, including the realizational and word-syntax approaches; however, the analysis of cliticization suggested is inspired by the realizational view. The chapter also discusses the role of morphology within a constrained-based framework, including the issue of whether this formalism contributes to the development of a new morphological theory with its use of lexical multiple-inheritance hierarchies. It investigates the position that morphology occupies in other frameworks such as Distributed Morphology (DM) and Optimality Theory (OT).

This chapter contends that the arguments that led linguists to the unaccusative approach can all be handled by a version of the more traditional view that takes reflexive verbs to be unergative predicates. Moreover, it shows that when reflexives are submitted to syntactic tests of unaccusativity, they systematically fail the tests in a variety of languages. More specifically, their subject does not pattern with internal arguments. The morphological similarity often attested between reflexives and unaccusatives is not due to a common argument structure, but to the basic operation at the heart of their derivation. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 6.2 rejects the possibility that reflexive clitics are object clitics. Section 6.3 discusses the operation of reduction, which is the operation that derives reflexive verbs. Section 6.4 examines and discards the arguments advanced by proponents of the unaccusative analysis in favour of their approach. Section 6.5, in turn, provides cross-linguistic evidence that the subject of reflexive verbs is not an internal argument. The last section shows how the distinctions between reflexive verbs in Hebrew, Dutch, and English vs. Romance can be straightforwardly accounted for if reflexives can be derived either in the lexicon or in syntax.

According to Kayne”s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA), the linear order of terminals in a structure depends on asymmetric c-command relations among the non-terminals. Since the LCA is incompatible with multidominance (MD), the questions arise: how are MD structures linearized, and what constrains MD? Recently, several proposals have argued that an MD representation is admissible if it is linearizable by (some version of) the LCA. This chapter argues against this view. The chapter shows that an MD compatible version of the LCA cannot linearize Croatian non-MD structures containing the clitic je. The problem re-emerges in Croatian coordinated wh-questions (Q&Qs), and German Subjektlücke in finiten Sätzen. The chapter concludes that in MD representations, linear order is not predictable from the structure. Consequently, the claim that MD is constrained by linearization becomes moot. The data are explained if we adopt the claim that what constrains MD is a syntactic constraint, the COSH.

This chapter takes the issue of grammaticalization back to its theoretical foundation. It lays out the argument for a reversion to the Neogrammarian position by examining in detail the types of change that have come to be known as degrammaticalization. These involve change of a functional element to something less functional, or less restricted in its distribution, such as the ‘deflexion’ of the English and Swedish genitive suffixes to become phrasal affixes or clitics. Degrammaticalization poses a challenge for those who insist that change linking lexical to functional status is unidirectional. However, it is argued that both grammaticalization and degrammaticalization are subtypes of analogical change. It is shown that known examples of degrammaticalization involve analogy of the familiar type: paradigm leveling or proportional analogy. Grammaticalization is analogy of a sort closely bound up with the generative conception of language: analogy with exemplars provided by universal grammar. Grammaticalization may thus introduce changes with no model in the surface data of the preceding generation (for example, a modal auxiliary) because this model is provided by UG.