Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

was less fixed (subject to the Tobler-Mussafia law -see Benacchio & Renzi (1987)). I will not
elaborate on the matter.
Since the enclisis/proclisis facts are not predicted from a synchronic point of view,
Portuguese is not necessarily a counter-example: since in this language clitics have had a
development which is rather different from the one in other Romance languages (there is nothing
similar, in the latter, to Portuguese clitic-order alternations in main clauses being sensitive to
negation and preverbal quantification), it might simply be that extra-movement to NOM o does
not necessarily correlate with enclisis (maybe because of a different reanalysis process in the
history of Portuguese). This conclusion is too loose to be of great interest. I think that the co-
occurrence of proclisis and enclisis could be the key to a more accurate analysis of the facts. It
might also be that enclisis is the core option. 123 I leave the issue here.
theorem.
In the next section we will see how the above assumptions interact with the PRO-
Interrogative infinitives in Romance NSLs present a problem which also appears in finite
embedded interrogatives. Consider the following finite paradigm from Catalan (which is
representative of all Romance NSLs as far as I know):
123 Joana Louro (p.c.) pointed out to me that enclisis in
standard Portuguese requires some morpho-phonological
alternations which are not used in the colloquial version of
enclisis and that are rather annoying. So it might be that:
- enclisis is the unmarked option, but proclisis is also
allowed as a marked variant.
- to speak Portuguese 'correctly', you have to learn
cumbersome rules affecting enclisis.
- so speakers shift to proclisis to avoid both cumbersome
school grammar rules and speaking 'incorrectly'.
1