| ROA: | 250 |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Best Clitic: Constraint Conflict in Morphosyntax |
| Authors: | Jane Grimshaw |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 27 |
| Abstract: | The Best Clitic: Constraint Conflict in Morphosyntax Jane Grimshaw Rutgers University This paper presents an analysis of object clitic pronouns in Romance; Italian and Spanish in particular. The occurrence of unexpected clitic forms in certain combinations is argued to follow from the effects of a constraint against duplication of clitics. This constraint conflicts with faithfulness constraints which impose faithfulness to input morphosyntactic specifications for case, person, number etc. The ranking of the anti- duplication constraint relative to key faithfulness constraints determines whether a grammar allows duplication, or selects instead a clitic which is less faithful to the input than the clitic which would occur in isolation. The representation of the clitics, as partially specified clusters of morphosyntactic properties, interacts crucially with the faithfulness constraints, which prefer partially specified (less marked) clitic outputs to those which are more fully specified but contradict the input more. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |