| This thesis is a qualitative and quantitative study of the changes that occurred in the phrase structure and system of pronominal clitics in medieval and renaissance Spanish, with the goal of explaining the basic differences between the syntactic properties of clitics in Old Spanish and their counterparts in the various dialects of modern Spanish.;Specifically, I argue that these differences are explainable if we classify OSp clitics as Second Position (2P) clitics, in contrast to their modern counterparts. 2P clitics are treated here as prosodically deficient phrasal constituents that appear displaced from their canonical positions as internal arguments of the verb and are adjoined to a phrasal projection at the left edge of the clause (IP). The elements encompassed under the pre-theoretical notion clitic in modern Spanish, however, are not linked to an argument position via a movement chain; rather, they are proposed to be verbal affixes that enter into inflectional relationships with their coindexed argument positions; alternatively put, they are members of the morphological complex instantiating abstract inflectional features, specifically those of object agreement, and hence inherent components of X;I show that the reanalysis from phrasal categories to X... |
