Cases of apparent enclisis on past participles in Romance varieties

Abstract

This paper deals with cases of apparent enclisis on past participles in North-Western Italian varieties. It is claimed that these cases do not involve clitic pronouns, but weak pronouns in the sense of Cardinaletti and Starke (1999). Both syntactic and morphophonological evidence is discussed. Some varieties display both proclitics and postverbal weak pronouns and use them in different syntactic contexts. Other varieties lack clitic pronouns in their lexicon altogether and only display weak pronouns (alongside strong pronouns), similarly to what happens in e.g. Germanic languages.

An emergentist view on functional classes

“…This idealised picture is often challenged by cases in which clitics can be stressed as in (6), have the same form of strong pronouns as the French enclitic in (7), do not climb in compound tenses as in (8), may be separated from the verb by certain adverbs as in (9), or occur as the complement of a (lexical) preposition as in (10) (6)-(10) challenge or support the proposed distinction into pronominal classes? Laenzlinger 1993Laenzlinger , 1994Repetti 2006, 2014;Repetti 2016;Cardinaletti 2015aCardinaletti , 2015b have argued that the clitics in (6)-(10) are in fact weak elements in the sense of Cardinaletti 1991Cardinaletti , 1998Cardinaletti & Starke 1999. Conversely, I argue that the phenomena in (6)-(10) end up challenging class-based accounts like (1)-(2) as none of the properties distinguishing weak from clitic pronouns, listed in (11), hold systematically across languages.…”

“…Conversely, if we pursue an analysis of (46) in terms of pronominal classes (by claiming that the lower pronoun is weak and not clitic), we end up missing the relation holding between the puzzling behaviour of (46) and the far less exceptional patterns in (47)-(48), unless one claims that the pronouns in (47)-(48) are weak as well. Laenzlinger 1993, Ordóñez and Repetti 2006, 2014Cardinaletti 2015aCardinaletti , 2015b have argued that some puzzling morphophonological alternations between proclitics and enclitics can be accounted for if certain enclitic pronouns are analysed as weak elements.…”