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Previous research has shown that the computation of subject-verb number agreement can be derailed by the presence of syntactically illicit nouns, a phenomenon called agreement attraction. By contrast, the incidence of agreement attraction with anaphoric dependencies is less clear: Previous work has mostly focused on reflexives and strong pronouns, which sometimes show attraction and other times do not. Meanwhile, research on clitics - a different class of pronominal anaphora - is scarcer. To expand the empirical record, we examined clitic pronouns in an under-researched language, Bulgarian. The results of a large sample eye-tracking study showed clear agreement attraction effects in fixation durations and regressive eye-movements to the clitic pronoun and following words. These findings provide further evidence that the variable attraction profile of anaphoric dependencies might depend on the features of an anaphoric element, including its placement and the role of syntactic constraints in establishing the antecedent-pronoun dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the syntactic position of negation and how that connects to negation's morphological realization and semantic and pragmatic effects. We focus on the case of contracted negation in English, which may appear both before and after the grammatical subject, and which has been classically analyzed as involving a single syntactic element placed by syntactic rule into distinct linear positions. We argue that this analysis is incorrect and that, in fact, there are multiple negations in English which are not related by a syntactic movement rule. We use the rich and complex morphosyntactic and semantico-pragmatic variation in the behavior of negation in varieties of Scots to motivate the argument and to develop a new approach that comes with both empirical and theoretical advantages.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates orality in academic presentations by speakers of German as L1 from the GeWiss corpus and compares them with interactional domains from the Research and Teaching Corpus Spoken German (FOLK). In addition, three oral phenomena in scientific lectures are analysed, namely deviations from standard orthographic phonation, the use of clitics and the use of modal particles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the syntax of subject clitics in northern Italian dialects. Statistical analysis is performed on a sample of 350 dialects to show that the co-variation between syntactic variables is significant. The variables under examination are the occurrence of subject clitics with non-dislocated subjects (e.g., the wh element who); the occurrence of subject clitics with nonthematic predicates (e.g., weather verbs); and the occurrence of subject clitics with subjects of any person. Syntactic variables are in turn linked to verbal agreement; in the above contexts, clitics are more readily found in dialects with "poor" inflection. Theoretical issues concerning the syntactic representation of subject clitics, null subjects, and doubling are addressed in light of quantitative findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work describes a case of object clitic reduplication (OCR) in restructuring sentences, in a Central Italian dialect: Perugino. OCR (not attested in the local variety of Italian spoken in Perugia) is optional and alternates with either enclisis or proclisis. It may concern direct and indirect object clitics, without person restrictions, locatives, partitives and reflexives. Only proclisis is instead possible with middle se. In sentences with more than one restructuring predicate, the clitic can occur only twice, and with some restrictions. The data suggest that middle se does not behave like (other) object clitics, including reflexive uses of se, a distinction also revealed by standard Piedmontese. The data also reveal that the boundaries of the two closely related non-standard varieties (the dialect and the local variety of Italian spoken in Perugia) are not blurred, nor are there intermediate repertoires or dialect continua. OCR is compatible with monoclausal as well as with biclausal analyses of restructuring sentences, but not with models that assume a different structure/derivation for restructuring sentences in the case of proclisis and in the case of enclisis. If a monoclausal structure is to be assumed, OCR suggests that there are (only) two clitic positions/strings in the clause. The lower position/string, however, cannot be made available only by lexical verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acquisition of clitics still remains a highly controversial issue in Greek acquisition literature despite the bulk of studies performed. Object clitics have been shown to be early acquired by monolingual children in terms of production rates, whereas only highly proficient bilingual children achieve target-like performance. Crucially, errors in gender marking are persistent for monolingual and bilingual children even when adult-like production rates are achieved. This study aims to readdress the acquisition of clitics in an innovative way, by entering the variable of gender in an experimental design targeting to assess production and processing by bilingual and monolingual children. Moreover, we examined the role of language proficiency (in terms of general verbal intelligence and syntactic production abilities). The groups had comparable performance in both tasks (in terms of correct responses and error distribution in production and reaction times in comprehension). However, verbal intelligence had an effect on the performance of the monolingual but not of the bilingual group in the production task, and bilingual children were overall slower in the comprehension task. Syntactic production abilities did not have any effect. We argue that gender marking affects clitic processing, and we discuss the implications of our findings for bilingual acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution addresses a set of phenomena attested in the dialects spoken in Piedmont, including Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties, and in West Liguria, concerning the interaction between subject and object clitics. Complementarily to these phenomena, we find the interplay between the realization of the 3rd person clitic and the auxiliary. More specifically, we will investigate the object-for-subject mechanism in the Piedmontese and Franco-Provençal dialects, the one of subject-with-object in some Franco-Provençal dialects and their possible interaction with the auxiliary. In some Piedmontese dialects, the alternation between be and have affects the distribution of subject and object clitics; in particular, the 3rd person clitic can occur in all persons, where it can be ambiguous between the subject or the object reading. The relation between the verb and the realization of its argumental clitics, and the interaction between auxiliaries and clitics are the main topics of this work. Our approach relies on the idea that clitics are the realization of φ-features associated with v and T and that auxiliaries are not functional elements but verbs with lexical properties. The theoretical frame we follow is the formulation recently proposed by Chomsky, based on the operation Merge and the Labeling Algorithm, leading to a more appropriate conceptualization of morpho-syntactic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary focuses on clitics in Spanish and discusses two recent studies that report on clitics in language contact situations: Mayer and Sánchez (2019) on clitics in bilingual Quechua-Spanish and bilingual Shipibo-Spanish varieties, and Jiménez-Gaspar, Pires, and Guijarro-Fuentes (2020) on clitics in Catalan and Spanish in contact. We briefly discuss the properties of clitics in Spanish, followed by their role in language variation and contact (i.e. language contact, heritage Spanish, and second language learning). We then comment on the two papers on clitics in language contact, which show how the outcomes of language contact vary across language pairings and contact situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Person clitics show proclitic attachment in some West Iranian languages. Nevertheless, most of the literature has continued to focus on enclitics. This paper provides evidence that a good number of modern languages have developed proclitics, presumably from the middle Iranian period onward. Using synchronic data from modern languages gathered in the field, and contrasting it with the Middle Iranian period and current clausal second-position clitic systems, we develop some hypotheses regarding the rise of proclitics in modern languages. We argue that proclitic attachment has resulted from the reanalysis and/or the loss of clause-initial clitic hosting particles of the Middle Iranian period, and the actualization of the stray clitic as a proclitic on some host to the right. This trajectory from second position enclitics to proclitics, which is also attested in Old Romance and Uto-Aztecan, is argued to have been triggered by head attraction and rightward drift of clitics from clause-second position toward the verb in modern languages, giving rise to VP-based and Verb-based cliticization systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we study the linguistic variation of the ser de + infinitive construction with passive interpretation (Eso es de aplaudir) with examples taken from CORPES and Corpus del Español (Mark Davies). The consultation of both corpora has allowed us to confirm that the construction not only has more vitality in American Spanish, but that it presents two uncommon variants in European Spanish: it appears with accusative clitic (Eso es de aplaudirlo) and with the particle se (Eso es de admirarse). We will argue that this behavior responds to two different analyses: a passive one, which would explain the absence of a direct complement in general Spanish or the presence of particle se in some American varieties, and an impersonal active one (present mostly in Central America), which would in turn justify the presence of the accusative clitic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides evidence for the existence of endoclitics in Andi, a Nakh-Daghestanian language of the Avar-Andic branch spoken in the Republic of Daghestan, Russia. In Andi, the additive marker ('also') and the intensifying marker ('even, at all') behave as enclitics on various types of hosts and as endoclitics when they occur on negative verb forms. In the latter case, the additive and intensifying markers break up the word form and appear before the negation marker. I argue that both the additive and the intensifier are clitics, especially in view of their highly promiscuous attachment. I also show that negative verb forms are morphologically synthetic, so the additive and the intensifier are genuine endoclitics, i.e. clitics that occur inside morphological words. In addition I provide a few parallels for the unusual morphosyntactic behaviour of additive and intensifying clitics in some other Nakh-Daghestanian languages as well as in some languages of Northern Eurasia. Although in these cases the corresponding markers do not qualify as endoclitics proper, the available data hint at a cross-linguistic tendency towards word-internal placement of morphemes with meanings like 'also', 'even' or 'only'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the factative and perfect markers in Degema and Kalaḅarị. The research is motivated by the observed similarities and differences in the properties/behaviour of these markers in both languages. The article notes that the factative and perfect markers are monosyllabic in both languages, and that the perfect marker in Kalaḅarị is opaque to vowel harmony because it is prosodically independent. With reference to morphology, it notes that whereas the Degema factative and perfect markers are clitics, their Kalaḅarị counterparts are words. On a morphosyntactic level, the article observes that unlike in Degema, the factative marker in Kalaḅarị does not occur within monomorphemic stems because it is not a clitic. It is further restricted by syllable structure. The findings of this article validate the fact that although languages may have elements with similar features, such elements may not pattern in the same way, and that differences in patterning make each human language unique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyse Spanish verbal constructions that accept both the clitic se and the prefix auto- in order to determine whether these formations are or are not more agentive than the corresponding non-prefixed constructions (autocriticarse vs. criticarse). The proposal arises from the discussion about the different semantic values observed in formations with auto- and explores the distinctive features of such formations in contrast to those without auto-. We carried out a twofold analysis: first, we applied a set of tests of agentivity and control to a sample of 130 verbs with auto- extracted from the Modern Spanish Reference Corpus (CREA) and compared the sample with its non-prefixed pronominal pairs (i.e. verbs with clitic se). Second, we carried out a series of surveys using similar tests with Spanish speakers to guarantee the acceptability of the corpus interpretations. We argue that prefixed constructions show a higher degree of agentivity and control by external arguments, which results in the impossibility of bidirectionally replacing these constructions with those that only have the clitic se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the knowledge of bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish regarding the production of object pronominal clitics (excluding non-reflexive third-person clitics), with a focus on: (i) their morphology, considering the variants that coexist for each form, and (ii) their syntactic placement (proclitic or enclitic) with respect to the verb. We present results from a study of thirty-nine simultaneous bilingual Catalan-Spanish speakers, residents of several geographic areas of Majorca, Spain, including the capital, Palma, and several villages. The speaker data came from a spontaneous oral production task carried out separately in each one of the two languages. We also analyze historical data from a diachronic corpus of Catalan to evaluate whether clitic properties of the Catalan produced by bilinguals constitute grammatical innovations in the language. The results indicate that bilingual speakers of Majorcan Catalan mostly acquire archaic forms for clitics (proclitics and enclitics) that also match the corresponding form of Majorcan Spanish clitics. We interpret these results as showing an effect of bilingualism with Spanish that has contributed to the preservation of archaic forms in the grammar of bilingual speakers of Catalan in Majorca because these forms partially match the ones found in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article focuses on Bregagliotto and Mesolcinese, two Lombard Alpine dialects, feminine plural agreement/concord is marked by the formative -n, a reflex of the 3rd person plural verbal ending; In Bregagliotto, plural -n triggers mesoclisis of the feminine subject clitic in contexts of inversion, whereas in the noun phrase -n behaves as a second-position element marking plural feminine concord.

The aim of this paper is to provide an explanation of the emergence of DOM in peripheral Macedonian dialects through a reevaluation of the contact hypothesis. The southern and south-western dialects in the contact zones with Greek and Aromanian use a dative-based pattern to mark specific, predominantly human and animate referents. However, the contact hypothesis cannot fully explain the origin of DOM in the southernmost dialects because it overlooks the wider interlingual context within which this change occurred. Relying on the analysis of the examples from the oldest sources with DOM, the author argues in favor of a multifactorial explanation of its origin: contact obscured the case marking functions of clitics and provided an analytic direct object pattern. The introduction of na -marking on direct objects satisfied both the semantic and pragmatic requirements of a successful message by discriminating between the syntactic functions and discourse prominence of the object participant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the general distribution and interpretation of bare noun phrases (BNPs) in Reunion Creole (RC). To set the required background for this description, it also discusses the count-mass distinction and offers an insight into the determiner system since elements such as prenominal lo and postnominal -la have received rather divergent designations and analyses in the literature. Observations rely on oral data and felicity judgments. We show that RC BNPs can occupy the same positions as noun phrases (NPs) modified by a determiner and that they can be left-dislocated, clefted and topicalized. We provide evidence that, except for some specific contexts, monosyllabic BNPs are not licensed and that the form lo is mandatory to build a grammatical NP out of nouns formed by a unique light syllable. We also demonstrate that, in these cases, lo is actually a semantically empty element. BNPs are number-neutral; we argue that existential BNPs are pseudo-incorporated in some cases but that they always have weak reference. BNPs can receive generic and kind readings, as well as an existential and a certain definite interpretation: they are weak definites, i.e. they are semantically, never pragmatically definite (following Löbner 1985, 1998, 2011, 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazilian Portuguese used to have null subjects like European Portuguese, but today they are mostly lost. It has been claimed that this change to the null‐subject parameter made Brazilian Portuguese no longer a subject‐prominent language (aka an agreement‐prominent language) but a topic‐and‐subject‐prominent one, with the appearance of so‐called topic subjects. In this article, we show that the loss of null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese is not sufficient to explain the emergence of topic subjects: the generalized loss of third‐person clitics also plays a crucial role. We provide evidence from within Brazilian Portuguese, comparing topic‐subject constructions to clitic‐left‐dislocation constructions with first‐ and second‐person pronouns; we also compare Brazilian Portuguese to Dominican Spanish, a language that has also mostly lost null subjects but has retained its entire clitic system. We show that what is behind the appearance of topic‐subject constructions in Brazilian Portuguese is the partial disappearance of clitic left dislocation, a topic construction that Dominican Spanish has retained for all persons. The analysis proposed appeals to empty dative clitics and their inability to assign case in Brazilian Portuguese. Finally, we adopt the feature‐inheritance hypothesis (Miyagawa 2010) in order to derive the topicality of Brazilian Portuguese's so‐called topic subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH) makes an important contribution to the analysis of morphosyntactic issues relating to L2 acquisition. An important factor in the development of the PTH has been the representation of clitics (which belong to the set of functional elements), as found in verb inflections and DPs (determiner phrases). On this basis, it may be assumed that internal clitics are invisible to the prosodification process whereas affixal clitics and free clitics, which are derivationally active (in a theory-neutral sense), are visible in prosodification. So, how do affixal clitics and free clitics differ in terms of their lexical representation and in terms of the level at which they are submitted to the translation facility (which maps morphosyntactic representations on to phonological representations)?. [Extracted from the article]

The Choctaw verb hosts argument‐referencing morphemes that could plausibly be analyzed as φ‐agreement affixes or argument‐doubling clitics. I argue that (almost) all the morphemes in question are clitics, on the basis of several state‐of‐the‐art tests. The bulk of the argumentation comes from two of the morphemes' properties in particular: firstly, they participate in clitic‐climbing alternations, and secondly, they are able to license the extrinsic plural marker oklah, an element with the syntactic licensing conditions typical of floating quantifiers. Following much work proposing that clitics have the syntactic status of determiner heads in an A‐movement chain with their DP associate, I show that the properties just outlined follow straightforwardly from a clitic analysis, but would not be predicted under a φ‐agreement analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the use of pronouns has been extensively investigated in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), most studies have focused on English, and no study to date has investigated the use of subject pronouns in null subject languages. The present study aims to fill this gap by investigating the use of subject and object pronouns in 5- to 8-year-old Greek-speaking high-functioning children with ASD compared to individually matched typically developing age and language controls. The "Frog where are you" (Mayer, 1969) narrative task was used to elicit subject and object pronouns as well as Determiner Phrases (DPs). Greek is a null subject language, and as a result, subject pronouns most often remain without phonological content. The findings showed that both groups used more null than overt subject pronouns, indicating that children with ASD know that Greek is a null subject language. TD children used more null subjects than subject DPs, whereas children with ASD used an equal proportion of null subjects and subject DPs. In terms of object pronouns, both groups produced more clitics and object DPs than strong object pronouns, but the difference between clitics and DPs did not reach significance in either of the groups. Importantly, the groups did not differ from each other in the use of ambiguous pronouns in both the subject and object position. The ASD children's avoidance to use pronominal subjects can be taken as evidence that they use a strategy to avoid infelicitous reference. This would suggest that the ASD children's difficulties with pronouns is not due to difficulties in core grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that variation in how 3rd person clitic combinations are solved across Catalan varieties depends on the internal morphosyntactic shape of the dative clitic in each variety. We argue that the dative clitic in Valencian Catalan is an inherently case-marked pronominal form (KP), while non Valencian Catalan varieties, that contain a locative clitic, build the dative as a definite locative pronominal which receives structural case. This allows Valencian Catalan to license each clitic in a different area, while non Valencian Catalan is forced to license a sequence of clitics in the same area, with the result that the two forms compete with each other for the licensing by the same head, leading to surface impoverishment of the sequence. Our analysis provides an explanation of these impoverishments as simple syntactic competition for licensing by the same set of heads, making OCP effects in morphology or syntax unnecessary as analytical devices for such cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the clitic left dislocation (CLLD) construction in L2 Spanish to investigate whether generative SLA has valuable insights to contribute to language teaching. Although CLLD is a structure that is commonly used by native speakers, as reported anecdotally and in at least one corpus, we found that native-Spanish and native-English teachers of Spanish have little metalinguistic knowledge of it. Crucially, we also found that CLLD does not appear consistently in Spanish textbooks. Additionally, it appears to be infrequent in the classroom input that learners receive, as we found in three lectures we recorded and tallied for CLLD usage rates. At the same time, study results show that the construction is learnable. Study abroad, that is, exposure to naturalistic input, appears to be a significant factor. Based on these collective findings, we suggest that learners at intermediate proficiency levels should be exposed to CLLD and that generative SLA is valuable to teachers in identifying such gaps in instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines the effect of input at the macro- and micro-levels on beginning level language learners of Italian. At the macro-level, learners are exposed to Structured Input activities targeting Italian accusative clitics to determine their effect on learners' default processing strategies. At the microlevel, the effect of the number of target item tokens in the input is measured and subsequently compared: 40 and 80 tokens. This study included pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test measures on interpretation and production to examine the effect of Structured Input activities. Findings reveal that Structured Input activities at varying token frequencies may affect learners' processing related to this target form as evidenced by their gains in interpretation, as well as their adoption of a 'second noun strategy' in which they overextend their altered processing strategy. As such, we discuss the theoretical and pedagogical ramifications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine spontaneous production data from the dialect of Modern West Thracian Greek (MWTG) (the local dialect of Evros) with regard to a hypothesis of syntactic borrowing of verbal transitivity. We argue that MWTG allows omission of the direct object with specific reference, in contrast to Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and other Modern Greek (MG) dialects (spoken in Greece), but similar to Turkish. Object omission in MWTG is possible only in contexts where SMG and other MG dialects show obligatory use of the 3rd-person clitic. We argue that syntactic borrowing in the case of language contact follows the transfer with second language learners: the relevant elements that host uninterpretable features are used optionally. Moreover, the definite article, in contrast to the indefinite article, is also affected by language contact. The 3rd-person clitic and the definite article are affected by contact as uninterpretable clusters of features. We claim that interpretability plays a significant role in transitivity in cases of language contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on recent work that argues in favor of a return to movement analyses for clitics (Uriagereka & Raposo 2005, Boeckx & Gallego , Roberts , ; Gallego), this paper explains why object clitics need to engage in probe/goal relations with agreeing verbs to value their Case features. A Case‐based account within Phase Theory (cf. Chomsky , ,) allows us to account for previously difficult to explain intervention and other displacement effects associated with these elements, and it also predicts clitic placement in a wide variety of ECM and causative constructions. Clitics in these constructions are sensitive to the timing and location of Case‐assigning mechanisms on the finite embedding verb, highlighting the importance of Case theory in deriving 'raising to object' phenomena in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clitic production is reported to be challenging for impaired children, suffering from dyslexia or SLI, and for early second language learners too. On the contrary, research has not directly investigated the relation between dyslexia, bilingualism and clitic production. The aim of our study is that of addressing this topic, by analyzing the performance of 4 groups of children in a clitic elicitation task: 25 Italian monolingual dyslexic children (mean age 10;08 years old), 33 Italian monolingual typically developing children (9;99 years old), 25 bilingual dyslexic children with Italian as L2 (10;31 years old) and 31 bilingual typically developing children with Italian as L2 (10;30 years old). As inclusion criteria, bilingual children had at least 5 years of exposure to Italian, including 3 years of consecutive school attendance in Italy. Clitic production was assessed by means of an elicitation task in which the pronoun had to be produced either in the simple present or in the present perfect; higher difficulties were expected in this last condition, in which the clitic has to agree in gender and number with the past participle. Results revealed that dyslexic children, both monolingual and bilingual, performed worse than controls both in the simple present and in the present perfect, indicating that clitic production is challenging in dyslexia. As for the bilingual children, instead, differences were found between the two tasks. In the simple present, bilingual children performed very accurately and similarly to their monolingual peers, indicating that a target performance with clitics is accomplished by typically developing children with a longer exposure to Italian and suggesting that previously reported difficulties were related to linguistic immaturity and are likely to disappear as their L2 exposure and competence grow. In the present perfect, instead, both groups of bilinguals performed worse than their monolingual peers, suggesting that bilingualism could exacerbate the difficulties in the most challenging condition. Importantly, however, no negative effect of bilingualism in clitic production was found once controlling for the subjects' vocabulary, evidencing the importance of lexical competence in the target language for a native-like performance in clitic production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines so-called "Person Case Constraint" (PCC) effects. These are ordering restrictions on co-occurring clitic pronouns, where only certain person combinations are felicitous but the possibilities vary cross-linguistically. Taking the South Slavic languages as a point of departure, an account is developed in terms of person feature spreading from a high Appl(icative) node to underspecified clitic pronouns. It is argued that 3rd person is the absence of person features, hence there is no PERS(on) node per se, and that person can be characterized in terms of PART(icipant) and AUTH(or). It is further argued that languages may differ in terms of how these two features are arranged, accounting for additional systems. Finally, speculations are offered on how feature spreading enlightens PCC violation repair strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controversy and uncertainty have plagued the question of whether “object markers” (OMs) are object pronouns cliticized to the verb or realizations of object agreement. Using data from Amharic, we address this question from a new perspective. Specifically, we claim that Amharic OMs should be analyzed as clitics because they are unable to double nominals that are quantified, anaphoric, or contain a variable bound by a quantifier. These restrictions can be derived from familiar principles of grammar—the Weak Crossover condition and the Binding theory—if and only if the OM is taken to be a pronoun (D) adjoined to v at LF. We then explain in terms of syntactic structure why these OMs can double even nonreferential DPs in experiencer subject constructions, whereas they cannot double theme arguments in unaccusatives or passives. Finally, we consider whether our analysis provides a diagnostic that distinguishes pronominal clitics from agreement morphemes across languages. OMs in Greek, Bulgarian, and Spanish seem to work broadly like Amharic, confirming that they are pronominal clitics. In contrast, OMs in Burushaski and Sambaa behave like agreement, even though certain other putative diagnostics suggest they might be clitics. We thus confirm that both object clitics and object agreement exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a usage-based approach to the construction [locative deictic + accusative clitic + intransitive verb] found in Galician/Galego. In this construction, the intransitive verb and the accusative clitic agree in person and number and, in the case of the clitic, also in gender with the referent of the clitic, as in, for example, aí a está (lit.: ‘there her is/there she is’)/aí as están (lit.: ‘there them are/there they are’). A corpus-based analysis of this construction shows that it presents skewed grammatical patterns in terms of frequency of occurrence. This grammatical skewing reveals that the construction emerges from an interactional usage pattern in which speakers shift from a displaced to an immediate mode of speaking to present a counter-expected situation. The construction is also exploited in narratives in order to create a quality of immediacy for displaced events. Our usage-based analysis also reveals a family of constructions — some more schematic, others more specific; some more entrenched, others more novel — that emerge from the repetition of local usage patterns through which speakers/narrators express immediacy and counter-expectation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence or absence of accusative clitic doubling in Bulgarian clauses with direct object preposing serves grammatical or pragmatic purposes and falls within the discussion on word order, in particular the analysis of clauses exhibiting marked word order. Grammatical doubling occurs in clauses where the clitics are part of the verb's morphological make-up and in clauses where the clitics serve as case markers for disambiguating the syntactic function of the initial noun phrase (NP). Pragmatic clitic doubling does not affect the clause grammaticality or in terms of semantics: it serves as a topicality marker, signaling the discourse-old status of the preposed NPs' referents or is used to activate such referents. Pragmatic clitic doubling may occur with focused discourse-old NPs, which at first sight may appear as an inconsistency: one would expect that the topic and focus should be identified differently. In Bulgarian pragmatic accusative clitic doubling is not admissible only when the preposed NP realizes contrastive, emphatic focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous literature contains two different points of view regarding the subjectobject asymmetry related to the DP head of pseudorelatives (PRs). Some authors claim that the DP head can only be interpreted as the subject of the embedded predicate (subject-gap PRs). Other authors point towards the possibility of finding other constituents (e.g. direct object) in head position (object-gap PR), too. In this paper I claim that there are certain languages that only allow the DP head to be the subject of the embedded predicate, that is, they only allow subject-gap PRs, whereas other languages allow both subject-gap and object-gap PRs. Thus, the aim of this paper is to present the object-gap PR generalization to account for the cross-linguistic availability of subject-gap and object-gap PRs: the availability of object-gap PRs is subject to object clitic doubling. The structure of this paper goes as follows. Section 1 introduces PRs. Section 2 presents data about subject-gap and object-gap PRs. Section 3 gives some remarks on object clitic doubling. Section 4 presents the object-gap PR generalization. Conclusions and further research issues are presented in section 5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of clitic development in bilingual children with and without SLI. One of the more specific goals of the study is to determine whether clitics can serve as a viable marker of SLI in Albanian-speaking children learning Greek. The participants in the study were 20 children, 6 of which were monolingual, 10 were typically developing Albanian-Greek bilingual children, and 4 were bilingual children with SLI. They all performed a task of sentence repletion during which they were asked to repeat sentences containing either simple cliticization or clitic doubling constructions. Results showed that bilingual children with SLI use clitics at a much lower rate than the other two groups. This performance is due to the low rate of usage of clitics in clitic doubling contexts, not in the simple cliticization contexts. These results make clitics a possible marker for SLI in bilingual children speaking Albanian, similarly to what has been found for other Indo-European clitic languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polish auxiliary clitics constitute an interesting set of data which draws attention to cross-linguistic differences among Slavic languages. A general principle for clitic placement in Indo-European languages is the one described by Jacob Wackernagel in his 1892 work. He concluded that clitics appeared in the second position in the clause, after the first word in a sentence. This pattern was true to some degree in Old Church Slavonic1 and still holds for a number of contemporary Slavic languages e.g. Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Czech and Slovak which have second position clitics. Bulgarian and Macedonian have verb adjacent pronominal clitics and Polish has auxiliary clitics (Migdalski 2007, 2010, Pancheva 2005). Also in the older versions of Polish language the above mentioned tendency was strong. In Modern Polish auxiliary clitics attach to the l-participle most frequently. However, one of the unusual properties they possess is the ability to choose almost every clausal element for their host. Polish auxiliary clitics can trigger morphophonological alternations on their hosts, which is an affix-like property; however, at the same time they display clearly clitic-like behaviour when they attach freely to words of any lexical class. The aim of this paper is to present and analyze the morpho-syntactic properties of two kinds of auxiliary clitics: bound and free. The bound clitics carry person-number agreement markers for past tense (the so called 'floating' or 'mobile' inflections). The free clitic is the morpheme by used for conditional and subjunctive mood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, we discuss the phenomenon of clitic climbing out of finite da2-complements in contemporary Serbian. Scholars' opinions on the acceptability and occurrence of this construction, based on a handful of self-made examples, vary considerably. Expanding on the assumption that the correctness of the phenomenon has often been denied due to its rareness we employ large corpora to examine the problem. We focus on possible constraints arising from the syntactic properties of clause-embedding predicates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The frequency of linguistic units and patterns (linguistic metrics) is specific to each language and varies depending on text complexity. In this study we investigate a number of measures that can contribute to determine text complexity/difficulty and be obtained automatically. The variables considered come primarily from counts of phonological units and patterns (e.g. word size, number of prosodic words and clitics, rare syllable types, exceptional stress patterns and rare segment classes), some of which being also informative of texts’ morphological and syntactic complexity and semantic density. We compared the linguistic metrics in a large sample of Portuguese medicine package leaflets (PL), a sample of PL from the medicines that belong to the three most consumed therapeutic groups, and two samples of more common texts (composed of journalistic and oral texts). For each indicator, oral texts, in particular texts produced by speakers with lower levels of education, showed the lowest values in a difficulty continuum, and frequently PL showed the highest values in that continuum, indicating that PL may be less readable than the other types of texts analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we discuss two types of cooccurrence restrictions involving reflexive clitics in European Portuguese and examine their implications for obligatory control. We argue that these restrictions may shed some light on where the controller is generated, thus making it possible to empirically test three Minimalist approaches to control: the predicate attraction approach (see Manzini and Roussou 2000), the PRO-based approach (e.g., Chomsky and Lasnik 1993, Landau 2000, 2004, Martin 2001), and the movement approach (e.g., Hornstein 1999, 2001, Boeckx, Hornstein, and Nunes 2010). We show that none of the approaches is able to capture all the relevant data if pursued under a strong lexicalist perspective such as Chomsky's (1993, 2000) and that only the movement approach can account for all the data in a uniform way under Chomsky's (2001) weak lexicalist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first claims that the Inverse Agreement Constraint and the Person-Case Constraint attested in overlapping sets of Uralic languages are manifestations of the same Inverse Topicality Constraint, requiring that the structural hierarchy of topicalized constituents correspond to the ranking of their referents in the Animacy/Topicality Hierarchy. Then it argues that it is the hypothesized Inverse Topicality Constraint that also underlies the Person-Case Constraints restricting the cooccurrence of clitics in ditransitive and ergative-absolutive constructions across languages. It is shown that alternative analyses of the Person-Case Constraint, e.g., those deriving it from the mechanism of multiple Agree, cannot account for the whole range of data attested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the expression of Catalan clitics en and hi, which have no grammatical equivalent in Spanish, in the adult grammar of Catalan-Spanish early bilinguals. Participants (N = 57), born and raised in Catalonia, are divided into 3 groups according to their onset of acquisition and language use: Spanish-dominant (n = 20), Balanced Bilinguals (n = 15) and Catalan-dominant (n = 22). The results of an Acceptability Judgment Task and an Elicited Production Task indicated that Spanish-dominant bilinguals have a divergent grammar compared to that of the Catalan-dominant speakers, overaccepting ungrammatical omission and doubling of the clitics. The bilingual group patterned with the Catalan-dominant group in some of their judgments, but with the Spanish-dominant group in their production. It is argued that onset of acquisition cannot be the only explanation for the differences between the bilingual groups, and that quantity and quality of input play an important role in the acquisition process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a surge in work on Person Hierarchy Effects (Béjar and Rezac 2009; Georgi 2011; Lochbihler 2009; Nevins 2007, 2011; Oxford 2014; Walkow 2009; Wiltschko 2008). In this paper, I analyze a curious case of such an effect which has been widely discussed in theoretical and descriptive work on the Quechua family (van de Kerke 1996; Lakämper and Wunderlich 1998; Milliken 1984; Muysken 1981; Weber 1976, 1989). In many Quechua languages, objects bearing the feature [Addressee] interact with subject agreement, but 1st person exclusive objects do not, even in the presence of a 3rd person subject. I dub this effect the [Addressee]-driven Subject Marking Anomaly (A-SMA), adapting the terminology of Weber (1976). After showing that object markers in Quechua languages are in fact object clitics, I argue that the A-SMA emerges from the interaction of cliticization with subject agreement: [Addressee] clitics raise above the subject in the clausal hierarchy, thus feeding agreement, but non-[Addressee] clitics do not. The analysis is extended to a related agreement effect involving plural objects in certain Bolivian and Argentine varieties of Quechua. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hittite attests two distinct second positions, occupied by: (a) Wackernagel enclitics; (b) non-Wackernagel enclitics -( m) a, -( y) a as well as stressed indefinite and correlative pronouns. I argue that Hittite provides novel data on the syntax-prosody interface as reflected in the operation of the second position constraint: the words belonging to group (b) combine properties which are typically ascribed to stressed and unstressed second position constituents. These findings show that the boundary between the stressed, syntactically conditioned second position exemplified by Germanic verb-second and the unstressed, phonologically conditioned second position of Wackernagel enclitics is much more blurred than is commonly acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates agent-oriented, manner, and frequency adverbials in Isbukun Bunun and demonstrates how voice affects the functions of adverbials and captures the notion of restructuring. Adverbial-verb constructions are shown to involve complementation rather than conjunction or adjunction. Undergoer movement, clitic climbing, and negation tests are utilized to show that Actor-Voice adverbials are regarded as nonrestructuring predicates, while Undergoer-Voice adverbials are treated as restructuring ones. Verb-adjacent clitic climbing in adverbial-verb constructions is also shown to be closely related to restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates two apparently distinct morphological processes that occur in some specific Vernacular Central Catalan clitic clusters: Fission and Impoverishment. In Fission, a cluster of first and second person clitics (e. g. te me) generates a third clitic in the sequence (e. g. se te me), while Impoverishment involves the replacement of the first or second person reflexive clitic in the cluster by the default reflexive: e. g. te me becoming se te. It is argued that Fission and Impoverishment are, in fact, successive stages of the same morphological phenomenon, which is referred to as Reflexivity Cluster Remapping. Assuming the framework of Distributed Morphology for pronoun paradigms, the various constraints that govern and limit Reflexivity Cluster Remapping are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We test the predictions of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) as applied to the L2 acquisition of French pronominal clitics by Anglophone learners, capitalizing on the fact that different semantic and morphosyntactic features are lexically encoded by French and English pronouns. A picture selection task and a self-paced reading task examine how the information encoded in the L2 forms affects off-line and on-line pronoun interpretation. Our findings suggest that the initial L1-L2 mapping was indeed influenced by the L1. Nevertheless, L2 learners successfully reassembled features into L2 bundles, as evidenced by target-like off-line performance. L2 reading time patterns, however, indicate that L1 representations may have a longer-lasting impact: learners' reactions to the mismatching input followed a different pattern and were slightly delayed as compared to native speakers'. These results are in line with the FRH, which conceptualizes L1 influence as the transfer of atomic linguistic features and their combinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general distinction between morphology and syntax is widely taken for granted, but it crucially depends on a cross-linguistically valid concept of '(morphosyntactic) word'. I show that there are no good criteria for defining such a concept. I examine ten criteria in some detail (potential pauses, free occurrence, mobility, uninterruptibility, non-selectivity, non-coordinatability, anaphoric islandhood, nonextractability, morphophonological idiosyncrasies, and deviations from bi-uniqueness), and I show that none of them is necessary and sufficient on its own, and no combination of them gives a definition of 'word' that accords with linguists' orthographic practice. 'Word' can be defined as a language-specific concept, but this is not relevant to the general question pursued here. 'Word' can be defined as a fuzzy concept, but this is theoretically meaningful only if the continuum between affixes and words, or words and phrases, shows some clustering, for which there is no systematic evidence at present. Thus, I conclude that we do not currently have a good basis for dividing the domain of morphosyntax into morphology and syntax, and that linguists should be very careful with general claims that make crucial reference to a cross-linguistic 'word' notion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two self-paced reading experiments we asked whether late, highly proficient, English-Spanish bilinguals are able to process language-specific morpho-syntactic information in their second language (L2). The processing of Spanish clitic pronouns'word order was tested in two sentential constructions. Experiment 1 showed that English-Spanish bilinguals performed similarly to Spanish-English bilinguals and revealed sensitivity to word order violations for a grammatical structure unique to the L2. Experiment 2 replicated the pattern observed for native speakers in Experiment 1 with a group of monolingual Spanish speakers, demonstrating the stability of processing clitic pronouns in the native language. Taken together, the results show that late bilinguals can process aspects of grammar that are encoded in L2-specific linguistic constructions even when the structure is relatively subtle and not affected for native speakers by the presence of a second language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]