Pronominal enclisis in VSO languages

Abstract

Introduction In this chapter we present evidence that both Semitic (Arabic and Hebrew) and Welsh clitic systems bear striking similarities to each other, and are significantly different from those of Romance or Germanic. We motivate an analysis of both systems which treats them as base-generated syntactic affixes in Agr. Hence these clitics are not in fact pronouns, that is, XPs. Our central theoretical claim is that this type of clitic system is non-trivially connected to the (full or residual) VSO nature of the languages in question. Adopting and adapting a proposal for English auxiliaries in Chomsky (1993), we propose that weak/clitic pronouns must check features with an Agr head with strong nominal features. However, we argue that the nature of VSO systems is such that Agr heads with strong features are largely absent. It follows that weak/clitic pronouns cannot be licensed in a VSO system. The functional role of such pronouns – which we will argue to involve licensing pro – is then carried by the Agr heads themselves. We thus tie together two apparently unrelated properties of these languages, namely word order and the nature of the clitic system. We also explain the pervasiveness of agreement marking that these languages show; where a Romance or Germanic language has a pronoun, these languages have agreement, hence it is not a surprise to find agreeing prepositions, for example. Moreover, the apparent preference for enclisis that these languages show is a consequence, in our terms, of the fact that the apparent clitics are really affixes; enclisis thus follows from the Right-Hand Head Rule (Williams 1981b).

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