Clitics : Lexicalization Patterns of the So-called 3rd Person Dative

Manzini and Savoia (1999, 2001, 2002, to appear) argue that the basic facts about the clitic string are best accounted for without having recourse to anything but a minimalist syntactic component, i.e. making no use of a specialized morphological component nor of optimality-type comparisons between derivations/ representations. In particular, they assume that clitics correspond to specialized inflectional categories, and are merged directly into the positions where they surface; such categories are furthermore ordered in a universal hierarchy, as we will detail below. The aim of the present paper is to consider datives in the light of this framework. We will conclude that there is no evidence for the category dative in the Romance dialects we shall consider, while in fact there is evidence for categorizations of so-called dative clitics as quantificational elements or as deictic elements (locatives). In all cases, the relevant categorization relies entirely on referential properties, or more generally on interpretive properties intrinsic to the lexical items involved, calling into question the traditional notion of Case itself.Manzini i Savoia (1999, 2001a, 2001b, en premsa) defensen que els fenòmens bàsics que afecten les seqüències de clítics s'expliquen millor només fent referència a un component sintàctic minimalista, és a dir, sense fer ús d'un component morfològic especialitzat o comparacions dins el marc de l'Optimitat entre derivacions i representacions. En particular, aquests treballs assumeixen que els clítics són categories de flexió especialitzades que s'adjunten directament a les mateixes posicions on després apareixen; a més, aquestes categories estan ordenades dins una jerarquia universal, tal com s'explica en l'article. L'objectiu d'aquest article és examinar el comportament de la categoria datiu des d'aquesta òptica. Conclourem que no hi ha evidència a favor de la categoria datiu en les llengües romàniques que examinem, sinó que hi ha evidència a favor de la categorització dels anomenats clítics de datiu com a elements quantificats o com a elements díctics(locatius). En tots els casos, la categorització emprada dependrà del tot de les propietats referencials, o més generalment, de les propietats semàntiques intrínsiques a les entrades lèxiques involucrades, fet que fins i tot posa en cuestió la noció tradicional de Cas

Root, Thematic Vowels and Inflectional Exponents in Verbs: A Morpho-Syntactic Analysis

A long-time generative tradition treats the functional domains of the verb and noun as a result of motion and affixing; however, assuming a close correspondence between the order in syntax and morphology, as in the Mirror Principle proposed by Baker seems to be too strong a hypothesis and empirically unsustainable. Distributed Morphology (DM) incorporates this idea by translating it into rules manipulating syntactic nodes. The morphological phenomena we will investigate essentially concerns the thematic vowel (TV) and its interaction with agreement morphology. A complex micro-variation emerges, which provides us with a test bench in order to account for the word-internal morphological organization. We question the idea that morphology is an auxiliary and expensive post-syntactic component, DM, that conveys information separated from its original locus as assumed by Embick and Noyer. On the contrary, we think that a more adequate account is reached assuming that the morphology is governed by the same computational rules as the syntax, where the operation Merge combines fully interpretable sub-word elements forming complex inflected words

Clitics in imperative: proclisis, enclisis and mesoclisis in Albanian and in Italo-Romance varieties of Lausberg area.

The relation between morpho-syntactic structure and its externalization into interpretive levels is the topic of this article. In many languages, typically in Romance and Albanian varieties, modal contexts, specifically imperative and infinitive, and negation, give rise to phenomena of clitic reordering and an interesting micro-variation. Imperative differs from declarative sentences in selecting enclisis except in negative contexts. Moreover, in Albanian mesoclisis appears in the 2nd plural person of imperative, between the verbal base and the person inflection. A similar distribution characterizes Calabro-Lucanian varieties spoken in Lausberg area, in contact with Arbëresh (Italo-Albanian) dialects. This article proposes to analyze the influence of modal contexts on the lexicalization of object clitics (OCls) and their different behavior in connection to their referential properties. Our descriptive and theoretical starting point is the representational morpho-syntactic approach adopted in Manzini and Savoia (2011 and subsequent works; see Section 5)