MARCS · A Markedness Account of Romance Clitic Systems

A Markedness Account of Romance Clitic Systems

This project deals with Romance clitic pronouns, i.e. pronominal elements that i) cannot bear primary stress and ii) may have a strong counterpart occurring in a different syntactic position. The project aims to combine evidence from different empirical domains (historical linguistics, synchronic comparison of present day vernaculars, L1/L2 acquisition, pathology) to elaborate a markedness model accounting for the organization of Romance clitic systems. First of all, I have tried to single out the factors that shape clitic inventories and constrain clitic syntax. These factors can be reduced to abstract parameters, i.e. binary choices with two possible values (positive/negative) dealing with the degree of markedness of syntactic, phonological and morphological structures. Parameters having a negative value act as filters preventing the occurrence of certain configurations across languages. Languages, however, tend to avoid such configurations by means of different repair strategies, which in turn can be ranked according to a scale of markedness. This hypothesis (namely, a parametric account based on a markedness model with repairs) may provide a better account of the number of variants displayed by grammatical systems w.r.t. cliticization. The work plan of the proposed project envisages the following phases (part of them overlap because some activities are expected to be carried out at the same time): Phase A: Review of existing material (months 1-8): In this preliminary stage I have studied in detail the vast existing literature on Romance clitics. Phase B: Selection of relevant phenomena (months 8-12). A provisional list of relevant factors is reported below: - phonological factors: stress assignment, constraints on syllabifications, alignment conditions, etc. - morphological factors: paradigmatic gaps, syncretism, suppletion, etc. - syntactic factors: clause type, type and position of doubled XP, verbal features (TAM, auxiliary selection), etc. - semantico-pragmatic factors: information structure, presuppositions, etc. Phase C: Data collection (months 13-17) Phase D: modelling (months 12-24): In this phase, I have formalized empirical observations to build a principled model in which the above factors are translated in binary, ranked parameters having to do with the structural properties of clitic elements. Phase E: preparation of the monography (18-24) Deliverables: At the end of each phase, I will write either a report (for internal purposes) or a paper (to be submitted to conferences/journals) summarizing the findings of previous activities. The list of deliverables is as follows: A) report on the existing literature B) report summarizing the relevant phenomena to be addressed C) report on fieldwork activity D) articles E) book proposal Due to the early termination of the project, I have completed Phases A and B, skipped phase C, and tackled phase D and E. Results are listed in the following section.

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