How to Put Your Clitics in Their Place or Why the Best Account of Second-position Phenomena May Be Something like the Optimal One

This article addresses the issue of how clitic elements come to occupy the positions they do in the surface forms of sentences. The empirical basis for the proposals here comes primarily from languages of the South Slavic family, but the treatment is intended to be more general. The background against which I would like to set this problem is the speciic set of proposals made in previous work within the theory of AMorphous Morphology (Anderson 1992, 1993). On this view, clitics are argued to represent a generalization to phrases of the kind of linguistic phenomenon we call \morphology" within the domain of individual words. The picture that results from this perspective is somewhat unorthodox. In contrast with much current work, it does not treat clitics as syntactically functioning terminal elements within a phrase marker, or as lexical items that are located in a speciic position by rules of the syntax. Instead clitics (including those that clearly manifest syntactic information, such as pronominals and auxiliary markers of tense and aspect) are analyzed as phonological material introduced into the PF representations of phrases by rules belonging to the same broad class as those of Word Formation. The discussion below will be developed as follows. I will rst provide some background on the nature and gross typology of clitics, and a summary of the argument and proposals concerning clitics within AMorphous Morphology (Anderson 1992, 1993). I will then rehearse in somewhat greater detail the reasoning which suggests that the tools of syntactic I am grateful to Wayles Browne and Paul Smolensky for valuable discussions that have aaected the form and content of this paper, which was originally presented at the GLOW Workshop in Vienna, Austria on 9 April, 1994. The audience at this presentation, along with others present for the GLOW meeting in Vienna, made other useful suggestions. an anonymous referee for this journal have provided useful comments on an earlier version. Naturally, none of these people are to blame for the use I have made of their insights, opinions, and data, much less for my failure to heed their advice. 1 analysis (sensu stricto) are not appropriate for the job of describing an important class of cl-itics (those appearing in`second position'). I then turn to a recent alternative proposal that supplements syntactic mechanisms with some attention to|and operations on|prosodic structure; I will claim that there are problems with this approach as well. …