Bengali emphatic clitics in the lexicon-syntax interface

In this paper, we advocate the view that to provide an adequate account of certain eli tic constructions, one must refer to more than one component of the grammatical system. We will argue that the emphatic clitics in Bengali must be licensed by both the morphophonemics of the lexicon and the syntax of logical form, where the latter largely obeys the constraints on overt syntactic movements. After presenting some of the core facts, we will first discuss the lexical account and then turn to the complementary logical-form account. In the last section, we will present our solution to a paradox that appears to arise when both the morphophonemic and semantic aspects of these eli tics are considered together.