ABSTRACT
Our starting point for the discussion will be a set of assumptions, motivated in Chapter 3, which include the idea that clitics correspond to specialized categories, and are inserted directly into the positions where they surface. Such categories are ordered in a universal hierarchy. We shall show that within such a framework, it is possible to account for some basic facts about the clitic string without having recourse to anything but a minimalist syntactic component. In particular no use is made of a specialized morphological component nor of optimality-type comparisons between derivations/representations. The main facts addressed include, mutual exclusion of object and subject clitics and the emergence of what are described in the literature as opaque forms.
