La nascita dei clitici romanzi

Abstract

The Birth of Romance Clitics. Thist paper seeks to reconstruct how the Latin (weak) personal pronouns were reanalyzed as verbal clitics in the Romance languages. As this process is strongly tied to word order phenomena, the first two sections study the positions which pronouns occupied in the sentence structure of Classical Latin and of Early Romance. This analysis is based on the reconstruction of sentence structure evolution proposed in Salvi (1999, 2000). Section 3 discusses some differences between Latin and Romance atonic pronouns and concludes that they belonged to two different grammatical categories: Latin weak pronouns were phrases, Romance clitics are heads/affixes. Finally, section 4 identifies the reasons for the diachronic reanalysis: in Vulgar Latin the obligatory expression of the core verbal arguments (probably a consequence of the loss of the Latin case system) strongly increased the occurrences of the weak pronouns, which, due to the changes in the sentence structure, were mainly adverbal. At the same time the evidence for their phrasal character was becoming so small, with the result that the pronouns, which mainly expressed the core arguments of the verb, were reanalyzed as adverbal heads.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.