It has become a commonplace to argue that pronominal clitics in
Romance languages have many of the properties of affixes rather than
clitics (Halpern 1995, Miller & Sag 1997, Monachesi 1999). This is
particularly clear in the case of European Portuguese enclitics, which
pass all the Pullum-Zwicky (1983) tests for affixes: they form a fixed
cluster in which the clitics show idiosyncratic allomorphy and they
invariably attach directly to a verb (1,2). Moreover, in the
Future/Conditional the pronominal clitics appear between the verb stem
and the tense/agreement endings (so-called 'mesoclisis', a phenomenon
which has thus far eluded insightful description, see (3,4)). Finally,
they trigger idiosyncratic stem allomorphy, a crucial sign of
affixation (5,6).
| (1) | O | João | deu-lhe | o | anel. | (2) | O | João | deu-vo-lo |
| the | João | gave-3.s | the | ring | | the | João | gave-2.s.dat-3.s.m |
| João gave him/her the ring. | | João gave it to you. |
| (3) | Senti-lo-emos(*sentir-o-emos) | (4) | Dar-no-lo-íam(*dariam-no-lo) |
| feel-3.s.m.acc-2.pl.fut | | give-1.pl.dat-3.s.m.acc-cond |
| We will feel it. | | They would give it to us. |
| (5) | Levamo-la | (*levamos-a) | (6) | Quero | fazê-lo | (*fazer-o) |
| take-3.s.f.acc | | | want.1.s | do-3.s.m.acc |
| We will take her. | | I want to do it. |
However, under certain syntactic and semantic conditions ('proclisis
triggers') exactly the same cluster exhibits proclisis (7). Here, the
attachment to the verb is much less strict and the cluster shows the
properties of phrasal affixation. The proclitics are left adjacent to
the edge of the VP and can be separated from the lexical or auxiliary
verb only by a handful of (mainly monosyllabic) adverbs. However, the
cluster can have scope over conjoined VPs (which is impossible
with the enclitics) (see (8,9)).
| (7a) | As | crianças | não | lhes | mostraram | os | presentes. |
| the | children | not | 3.pl.dat | showed | the | presents |
| the children didn't show them their presents. |
| (7b) | As | crianças | até | o | viram | em | casa. |
| the | children | even | 1.s.masc.acc | saw | at | home |
| The children even saw him at home. |
| (8a) | Eu | sei | que | ele | o | não | visitou. |
| I know that he | 3.s.m.acc | not | visited |
| I know that he did not visit him. |
| (8b) | Eu | sei | que | ele | o | ainda | não | visitou. |
| I | know | that | he | 3.s.m.acc | yet | not | visited |
| I know that he still has not visited him. |
| (8c) | Eu | sei | que | ele | me | ainda | hoje | disse | isso. | (Northern Dialects) |
| I | know | that | he | 1.s.dat | even | today | said | it |
| I know that he even said it to me today. |
| (9a) | Apenas | a | minha | mãe | me | ajudou | e | incentivou. |
| only | the | my | mother | 1.s.acc | helped | and | encouraged |
| Only my mother helped me and encouraged me. |
| (9b) | Acho | que | lhes | leram | uma | história | e | deram | um | livro. |
| think.1.s | that | 3.pl.dat | read | a | story | and | gave | a | book |
| I think that they read them a story and gave them a book. |
Crysmann (1997,2001) has recently proposed an HPSG analysis which
essentially "liberates" the morphological clusters into the syntax
for linearization. We concur with his general thesis but note several
inadequacies in his approach. In particular, we argue that the
enclitics are straightforwardly inflections attaching to stems, and
hence placed morphologically, while the proclitics are phrasal affixes
whose placement must make appeal to syntactic
(phrasal) categories.
The enclitic and proclitic clusters are absolutely identical so we
have the rarely-discussed circumstance in which stem-based affixation
and phrasal affixation places the same set of objects. This is a
phenomenon which has been largely ignored in the
syntactically-oriented literature ('suspended affixation' in Turkish
is a partial exception), and we provide further
exemplification of this phenomenon, showing that it is not as rare as
the paucity of discussion would suggest. This raises an interesting
problem, however, both for theories of affixation and for principles
such as lexical integrity which requires the strict separation of syntax
and morphology, and it is these aspects we focus on in this paper.
We propose a modest extension to the inferential-realizational
Paradigm Function Morphology of Stump (2001) to accommodate the
flexible placement of affixes such as the EP pronominal object
inflections (cf. also Stump 1993 on Swahili ambifixation). Affixes
themselves are pure form. The format of the realizational rule is
then split into components, exponence (specifying which affix is added
as the realization of the rule's feature set) and placement
(left/right alignment). The realization rules are then reformulated so
as to generate affix/clitic clusters in the absence of a specific
stem/host, without altering any other aspects of Stump's machinery. We
show that this separation of exponence from placement provides for a
very simple description of mesoclisis and also makes available a
clitic cluster which can be placed phrasally.
With this morphological machinery in place, we examine in more detail
the status of phrasal affixation in general and in particular the light that this
phenomenon sheds on the nature of the relation between syntactic
structure and its morphological expression. We argue that phrasal
affixes such as those found in EP procliticisation
contribute their f-structure information to phrasal nodes and are not
represented as terminal elements in the syntactic tree. The asymmetry between the
scopal properties of the enclitic and the proclitic falls out from the
phrasal affixation analysis in conjunction with the LFG theory of
coordination. The interpolation of X0 elements between phrasal
affix and head follows from the statement of placement requirements in
the morphology. We examine the apparently unrelated set of syntactic
configurations and constructions which trigger procliticisation in EP
and propose that an abstract syntactic feature is responsible for
triggering the phrasal affixation placement principle is
invoked (see Sells 2001 for a similar use of an abstract syntactic
feature in triggering special morphology in Swedish). Elsewhere, the 'normal' morphology supplies the appropriate
suffixed verb forms (enclisis). We offer a number of arguments to show
that enclisis is the elsewhere condition.
References
-
Berthold Crysmann (1997). Cliticization in European Portuguese using
parallel morpho-syntactic constraints, Proceedings of LFG97.
- Berthold Crysmann (2001). Clitics and Coordination in Linear
Structure, in B. Gerlach et al (eds) Clitics in Phonology,
Morphology and Syntax, John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
- Aaron Halpern (1995). On the Placement and Morphology of
Clitics, CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA.
- Philip Miller and Ivan Sag (1997). French clitic movement without
clitics or movement, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory,
15/3:573-639.
- Paula Monachesi (1999). A lexical approach to Italian
cliticization, CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA.
- Greg Stump (2001). Inflectional Morphology, CUP, Cambridge.
- Peter Sells (2001). Syntactic Information and its Morphological
Expression, Manuscript, Stanford.
Not submitted; contact authors for original LFG02 slides or current
manuscript.
Related work includes:
-
Luis and Sadler (to appear 2002).
Object Clitics and Marked Morphology.
In C. Beyssade, O. Bonami, P. Cabredo Hofherr and F. Corblin Eds
Empirical Issues in Formal Syntax and Semantics 4
Presses Universitaires de Paris Sorbonne.
Available via Sadler's web page.