Clitics are a notoriously difficult topic that has received much attention, from a number of theoretical vantage points, since the appearance of Zwicky's (1977) seminal article " On clitics. " What emerges from this vast body of work is that clitics are more easily characterized by what they are not, than by what they are. Elements referred to as clitics systematically defy the general distribu...

Since the seminal work by Brandi and Cordin (1981; 1989), Burzio (1986) and Rizzi (1986), the unstressed subject pronouns of northern Italian dialects (NIDs) have been considered (clitic) heads different from, for example, their French preverbal counterparts, which are considered maximal projections, namely ‘phonological clitics’ (Kayne 1983) or ‘weak pronouns’ (Cardinaletti and Starke 1999). A...

There is substantial debate over the mental representation of regular past tense forms in both first language (L1) and second language (L2) processing. Specifically, the controversy revolves around the nature of morphologically complex forms such as the past tense –ed in English and how morphological structures of such forms are represented in the mental lexicon. This study focuses on the resul...

This dissertation is primarily concerned with nontransparent output forms in Romance pronominal clitic combinations. The position is taken that pronominal clitics constitute hierarchical structures of morphological features. Each clitic is a subset of the structure shown below:

We argue that preverbal and postverbal subject clitics in northern Italian dialects are the same lexical items. The different forms of proclitics and enclitics can be explained phonologically (i.e., by phonological constraints ranked in a particular order) and by the hypothesis that morphologically neutral vowels may be inserted in final position (what we call morphological epenthesis). The dis...

This paper compares how object clitics combine and which clitics are chosen under restricted circumstances in six Romance languages. I will show that clitic sequences form a morphological unit with a fixed order of clitics. For each case, the optimal sequence results from interacting constraints on the morphology and phonology of clitic sequences within an Optimality Theoretic account. Furtherm...