ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an explanatory account of the divide between enclisis and proclisis in pronominal Clitic constructions in Romance and Semitic languages. The analysis is based on two fundamental assumptions: (i) Clitics do not target designated pre-labeled positions, but take maximal advantage of the available categorial structure; (ii) cliticization patterns are tightly dependent on the inflectional properties of the language, more specifically, on the feature content of the two functional categories, Infl and v. Nash and Rouveret show that the various asymmetries in Clitic behavior can elegantly be explained in terms of the minimalist theory of movement, combined with certain formal hypotheses about the building of phrase structure and about the relation of morphology to syntax. Relying on certain ideas about uninterpretable features, Attract and Agree, they argue that cliticization patterns can be made to follow from the strategies made available by U.G to check the uninterpretable feature(s) of the category Infl and from the derivational origin of the tense and person-number features. They introduce a new Principle, the Unselective Attract Principle, stating that an uninterpretable feature is a potential attractor for all the features which are of the same type as the one that it selectively attracts. Two additional Principles, the Priority Principle and the Single Licensing Condition, insure that at some point in the derivation a Clitic can incorporate into Infl only if Infl doesn’t already host an attracted inflectional morpheme. The authors show that this idea holds the key for the enclisis/proclisis divide and explains why enclisis—i.e., Clitic incorporation into Infl—is disallowed in Romance finite clauses, but legitimate in Semitic and European Portuguese finite clauses.
