Since Kayne's pioneering work on French clitic pronouns, two major questions have been asked with respect to the syntax of clitics: (i) what are the properties that force clitics to move differently from full DP's and regular affixes? (ii) why is it the case that clitics do not surface at the same positions crosslinguistically and within the same language? In this paper we try to provide an answer to both questions, insofar as its central aim is to account for Clitic Placement in European Portuguese vs other Romance languages, namely Spanish, Italian and French. We will try to show that the differences in Clitic Placement exhibited in these four Romance languages follow from the interaction of properties of Merge/Move and Economy principles and conditions on feature checking with the formal features of clitics and their hybrid status as X°'s/XP's (Kayne 1991, Chomsky 1994).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
