ABSTRACT
This chapter is an early attempt to come to terms with the complex cliticization patterns in European Portuguese, which mainly differ from that of other Romance languages in that enclisis is the rule in “neutral” affirmative declarative finite tensed clauses. At first sight, the enclisis/proclisis divide in European Portuguese appears to be directly correlated to the “height” of the functional category hosting the finite verb. The author argues that the host category cannot be C. A specific proposal is made, concerning the categorial architecture above IP, the syntactic space that today is referred to as the “left periphery.” It postulates the existence of a special head W between the IP and the CP systems, which coincides with the Wackernagel position often resorted to in the analysis of Germanic light elements and distinct from the Focus position which had been introduced in recent work by Brody (1990). Because of its feature endowment, W has the capacity to host Clitics and to Attract the finite verb. But the V-feature, which is checked via verb-raising in enclisis structures, is checked via another strategy in proclisis structure.
