Volume 17, Issue 1

A family of ‘doubling’ structures is presented based, on one side, on analyses from the literature on ‘clitic doubling’ of the Spanish type (Jaeggli 1982, Torrego 1995, Uriagereka 1995, Belletti 1999, Sportiche 1998, Kayne 1994, Rouveret 1989), and, on the other, on the classical analysis of the Floated quantifier phenomenology (Sportiche (1988)). A further kind of structure implementing doubling is identified in Italian, involving strong pronouns. It is claimed that doubling characteristically exploits the clause internal VP periphery (Belletti 2001, 2004) and is thus typically associated with particular discourse related interpretations and constraints. It is also claimed that doubling can be assumed to be at work in more structures than meet the eye; its role is particularly investigated in the crucial domains of subject inversion and nominative Case assignment. Finally, the status of doubling structures is addressed with respect to economy considerations; some speculative remarks concerning the comparative side of the analysis are briefly sketched out.

In Catalan vowel epenthesis and consonant deletion seem to have a different conditioning in simple words, in verb-clitic or clitic-verb sequences, and in clitic-clitic sequences (where an emergence of the unmarked effect with respect to syllable structure is found). In this paper, it is argued that, in spite of these domain effects, which would suggest the need for a serial analysis, all the facts concerning epenthesis and consonant deletion can be accounted for in a parallel optimality-theoretic approach. The differences in behavior are the consequence of the different ranking of morphological Alignment constraints with respect to other constraints and an Alignment constraint that makes reference to subsyllabic constituents.

The present article explores so-called interpolation structures in the dialects of southern Italy where, in contrast to most standard Romance varieties, the otherwise inseparable nexus consisting of clitic and verb can be interrupted by a specific class of intervening adverbs. In addition to providing substantial independent evidence for Cinque's (1999) richly-articulated clause structure and strictly ordered sequence of adverb positions, the proposed analysis of the southern Italian dialect data is demonstrated to shed light on the nature of pronominal cliticization and verb movement in Romance more generally. In particular, cliticization and verb movement are argued to variously target one of two positions in Romance, one associated with a clause-medial functional projection and the other associated with a relatively low functional projection, giving rise to four possible language types in accordance with attested Romance parametric variation.

The morphological status of adverbs ending in -mente in Spanish (-ly in English) has been the object of many studies and continues to be the subject of debate. The two main proposals regarding the morphology of these adverbs treat them as either compounds or derivatives as the result of suffixation, but both hypotheses present problems. In this study an analysis will be defended which treats -mente as a phrasal affix (cf. Zwicky 1987, Nevis 1985 and Miller 1992). The notion of phrasal affix has been used to describe clitics which, from a morphological standpoint, are similar to affixes but which, simultaneously manifest characteristics of independent words. The argument for analyzing -mente as a phrasal affix is based on both synchronic and diachronic data, including some similarities with object clitic pronouns.