Clitics and Clitic Constructions
2021
The paper addresses open questions in the literature of Clitic Doubling (CD):
(i) Where do CD-ed objects enter the derivation?
It is shown that CD-ed objects enter the derivation as arguments.
(ii) What kind of movement dependency do they establish e.g. head movement, XP movement, feature or long head movement?
The paper suggests that CD obligatorily involves one XP movement step of the doubled XP into a middle field position. Analyses which assume an in-situ object and plain head movement or feature movement are shown to be unable to capture the Greek data.
(iii) What is the grammatical contribution of clitics?
Greek clitics lack interpretive import e.g. specificity or familiarity; only the XPs that clitics associate with can have these interpretive properties.
(iv) When are clitics possible?
The paper proposes a new account according to which clitics can only be present if they are in the same phase with the XP they associate with.
(v) Is head movement or phrasal movement the preferred mode of syntactic remerge?
Following extensive previous literature, the paper argues against recent approaches which on the basis of CD support that head movement is the preferred mode of syntactic remerge. The paper offers evidence in support of the opposite conclusion, namely, that XP movement is preferred.
Clitic Dislocations and Clitics in French and Greek: From interpretation to structure (with Dominique Sportiche - accepted with minor revisions in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory - available here)
This paper explores questions bearing on the syntactic dependency that Clitic Left Dislocation realizes, the grammatical contribution of clitics and the articulation of the middle field in French and Greek.
(a) Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD)
Using interpretive properties as evidence, the paper shows that CLLD in French and Greek is a movement dependency. It involves movement steps of the left dislocated element from the argument position into the left periphery through hierarchically organized middle field positions.
(b) The grammatical contribution of clitics
The paper shows that French and Greek clitics lack semantic import that matters for binding purposes; only the XPs clitics double have semantic import.
(c) Middle-field
The middle field of French and Greek is hierarchically organized. There are several middle field positions serving as landing sites of accusative and oblique arguments. These positions are hierarchically organized in both languages as: ACC>DAT.