Formal lexical entries for French Clitics: PF dissociations of single marked features
Joseph Emonds
January 2017 

Systems of pronominal clitics for arguments and adverbial adjuncts of verbs in Romance languages have several regular properties that widely accepted grammatical models have yet to account for. The analysis here accounts for (i) orderings among French clitics that do not reflect syntactic phrasal ordering; (ii) the limited ‘structural distance’ between clitics and the interpreted phrases they replace; (iii) why clitics frequently have the same form as strong pronouns; and (iv) the extent to which language-particular clitic paradigms conform to Borer’s Conjecture. This system uses no clitic movements, and expresses all generalisations in terms of formalized, constrained lexical entries. Taken together, clitic properties suggest that groups of clitics are single lexical entries inserted in Phonological Form, with allomorphs specified by the parentheses/ brace notations, and a “dissociation” principle called Alternative Realization.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003578 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of the Third Olomouc Linguistics Conference. Marketa Janebová and Joseph Emonds (eds.), 109-134
keywords:	borer’s conjecture, clitic ordering, french clitics, lexical notation, person-case constraint, clause-mate condition, morphology, syntax
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