On the form and interpretation of clitics

This thesis presents a novel approach on argument related pronominal forms, supported with data from Romanian and other Romance languages, such as Italian, French and Spanish. Starting with the observation that strong argument related personal pronouns and clitics share a number of semantic and pragmatic properties (for instance, whenever they co-occur in clitic doubling constructions, they are both anaphorically related to the same antecedent in the preceding discourse) and thus they should not be considered two syntactically unrelated grammatical objects, we propose to capture that by placing them in the same syntactic projection in the higher functional field. This functional projection hosts D, phi and [identifiability features that can be expressed either as a clitic (i.e. the head of the projection, by virtue of the properties of clitics, which are Ds), or as a strong pronoun (i.e. the specifier of the same projection, by virtue of the properties of strong pronouns, which are DPs). The linear order of argument-related clitics and strong pronouns with respect to other constituents in the sentence, in particular the verb, is shown to be the result of the application of a PF operation, Flip (first proposed by Di Sciullo, 1999), which applies to syntactically heavy constituents and which switches the Spec-Head-Complement linear order. Given their heaviness of structure (i.e. they include a complement), heavy pronouns and doubled constituents (as DP or PP constituents) will surface postverbally as a consequence of the application of Flip. Flip is theoretically preferable to overt syntactic movement because it reduces computational load in Narrow Syntax and transfers it to PF. The main advantage of our proposal is the fact that there is no longer a need for different structures for verbs with pronominal arguments (in which the argument occupies a low, postverbal position) vs. verbs with arguments expressed as clitics (in which the clitic surfaces in a high, preverbal position). Moreover, in the clitic doubling constructions, given that the clitic and the double are found in the same projection, their reference to the same antecedent follows without further speculations. Clitic doubling is thus seen as a discourse-related phenomenon in this view. The last section of this thesis bears on the possible consequences of our proposal. We considered the analyses yielded by a syntactic parser prototype based on the Asymmetry Theory (Di Sciullo et al., 2006) specifically the clitic and strong pronouns constructions. In the AT-based parser, the asymmetric relations that establish between the feature structures of the input elements allow the parsing of the pronominal constructions in an unambiguous manner. This is realized by predicting the syntactic structure on the basis of the feature structures of the elements entering the parse and building the structure on the basis of the satisfaction of certain relations between these elements.