Description
Book SynopsisThis book offers an empirical and theoretical exploration of the development of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages, drawing on data from Latin, medieval vernaculars, modern Romance languages, and lesser-known dialects. Diego Pescarini examines phonological, morphological, and especially syntactic aspects of Romance object clitics, using the findings to reconstruct their evolution from Latin to Romance and to model clitic placement in modern Romance languages. On the theoretical side, the volume engages with previous accounts of clitics, particularly in generative theory. It challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency; instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which initially caused freezing of certain pronominal forms and then - through reanalysis - their successive incorporation to verbal hosts. This approach leads to a revision of earlier analyses of well-known phenomena s
Trade Review... is extremely valuable for future research. * Anna Chiara Bassan, LINGUIST List *
The different chapters of the book hang well together. Their ordering provides the overall schema, but there are many cross-references between chapters resulting from systematic methodologies and critical themes. The whole framework accounts for the accurate visualization of the object clitic phenomenon in Romance languages ... The present work is accessible to university-level students and is extremely valuable for future research. It provides a detailed source of bibliographic materials while evoking the historiographical process a theory or hypothesis is based on. * Anna Chiara Bassan, LINGUIST List *
Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I: Setting the Scene 1: Properties of Romance object clitics 2: Theoretical preliminaries 3: Historical overview Part II: Deficiency 4: Syntactic evidence against deficiency 5: Morphophonological evidence against deficiency Part III: The Emergence of Clitics 6: Clitics in embryo 7: The rise of ad-verbal clitics Part IV: Early Romance 8: 'V2' and clitic placement 9: Deriving enclisis in 'V1' clauses Part V: Towards Microvariation 10: Clitic climbing 11: Clitic combinations 12: Conclusions
