How to put your clitics in their place, or why the best account of second-position phenomena may be something like the optimal one

Abstract

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 specific set of proposals made in previous work within the theory of A-Morphous Morphology (Anderson 1992, 1993). 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. In contrast with much current work, it does not treat clitics as syntactically functioning terminal elements within a phrase marker, or as lexical items that are located in a specific position by rules of the syntax. Instead clitics (including those that clearly manifest syntactic information, such as pronominals and auxiliary markers of tense and aspect) are analyzed 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 first 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 1992, 1993). I will then rehearse in somewhat greater detail the reasoning which suggests that the tools of syntactic

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