No abstract

In traditional linguistics, pronouns are divided into two classes: those that can bear word stress, coined strong, full or tonal, and those that can not, coined weak, clitic, or atonal. However, in the last decades, research on this topic showed that items generally labeled as clitics are by far more complex. Between words and affixes, these hybrid linguistic entities challenge both description and modeling. As for Romanian, the debate on weak (i.e., clitic) pronouns was dominated by the question about their categorial status: are these items clitics or affixes? In this article, we present and scrutinize different approaches that support the claim that there is a difference between proclitics and enclitics, i.e., between clitics occurring before vs. after the verb. Since Romanian features a full-fledged pronominal system with different deficiency degrees, we evaluate these claims against it. We show that all these approaches manifest basic deficiencies.

No abstract