How to put your Clitics in their Place or Why the Best Account of Second Position Phenomena May be a Nearly 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 speci c set of proposals made in previous work within the theory of A Morphous Morphology Anderson 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 since it treats clitics not as syntactically functioning terminal elements within a phrase marker lexical items that are located in a speci c position by rules of the syntax but rather 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 A Morphous Morphology Anderson I will then re hearse in somewhat greater detail the reasoning which suggests that the tools of syntactic analysis sensu stricto are not appropriate for the job of describing an important class of cl itics those appearing in second position I will then discuss another recent 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 I will then suggest