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Developmental patterns of complement clitics
2. General Background: Complement Clitics, Derivation, and Modes of
Acquisition
2.1. Assumptions on Deriviation
Romance complement 2 clitic pronouns are assumed to fill a special functional
head position in the clause structure. According to different implementations of the
basic account of their distribution, clitics are assumed to fill a head in the high part
of the clausal functional structure dedicated to clitic pronouns (Sportiche’s (1996)
“clitic voice”); they can be taken to move to an Agr-type head in the high part of the
clause (Kayne (1991), Belletti (1999) and references cited there).The characteristic
of Romance complement clitic pronouns resides in the fact that they are nominal
arguments strictly connected to the verbal domain. Clitics are DPs which undergo a
computation whose crucial step only concerns the head of the DP. Clitic heads and
the head ultimately hosting the verb are intimately interrelated or actually coincident
with both the clitic and the verb filling the same functional head position, as in the
case of cliticization into finite verbs in French, Italian and other Romance languages.
Whatever the exact implementation of the cliticization process we want to adopt, a
functional head ultimately hosting the clitic is assumed to be present and active in
the high part of the clausal functional structure. We can assume that languages differ
as to whether such a functional head is activated or not: in languages with clitics it
is, in languages which do not have clitic pronouns it is not.
In finite clauses, Romance complement clitics are attached to the finite part of
the verbal construction. If the finite verb is lexical, this results in the order Cl Vfin in
declaratives. In both French and Italian, in periphrastic complex tenses involving an
auxiliary and a past participle, the complement clitic pronoun ends up attached onto
the auxiliary which carries the features related to finite morphology (e.g. person,
number and tense) and which is the highest verbal form in the clause structure,
yielding the order Cl Aux Past Participle (Cl Aux PPart). This is a typical ordering
in Romance. To our knowledge, an order Aux Cl PPart is admitted (only) in
Brazilian Portuguese (Bianchi and Figueiredo (1994)), where the status of object
clitics is probably different and closer to that of weak pronouns of the Germanic
type (Cardinaletti and Starke (1999; 2000) ). For complement clitics the cliticization
process ultimately involves movement of the clitic as a head (D°) 3 , whereas weak
pronouns move as maximal projections (DP) from the complement position to some
2 Under the cover term complement clitics, we here include both direct and indirect object
clitics (e.g. le, lui and reflexive clitics me te, se… in French) and prepositional clitics (e.g. en,
y, in French).
3 In the last step of the derivation, in a movement analysis of cliticization (Belletti (1999) and
references cited there).
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