A Lexical Approach to Italian Cliticization (review)

This book, a revised version of the author’s 1996 Ph.D. thesis (University of Tilburg), consists of six chapters. After a short introduction (Ch. 1), which includes a very helpful section outlining the lexicalist theory of head-driven phrase-structure grammar (HPSG), Monachesi discusses ‘The status of Italian clitics’ in Ch. 2, providing detailed empirical data about Italian monosyllabic pronominal clitics. M uses a set of well-established morphological criteria to argue that these clitics display properties that are typical of inflectional affixes. The chapter also includes a critical survey of previous phonological studies.

Ch.3 presents ‘The analysis of Italian clitics’ within the theory of HPSG. The crucial claim is that clitics are treated as featural information, provided in the lexicon, and used for the inflectional realization of cliticized verb forms. This chapter primarily addresses cliticization within simple tenses and offers an analysis of both single and multiple occurrences of pronominal clitics. Whereas single clitics are realized as individual affixes, clitic clusters are generated as portmanteau units.

In Ch. 4, M examines ‘The clitic si’ and the many interpretations it can receive in Italian (e.g. impersonal, middle, ergative, etc.). The distinction between argument and nonargument uses are accounted for by assigning si the ability to satisfy the subcategorization frame of the verb or to function instead as a grammatical marker.

The bisyllabic clitic loro, on the contrary, is analyzed as a word. In Ch. 5, a distinction is drawn between monosyllabic clitics and the bisyllabic clitic loro. Distributional and phonological evidence is used to show that only the former constitute affixes, while the latter exhibit word-like behavior.

The longest chapter in the book, ‘The analysis of Italian restructuring verbs’ (Ch. 6), addresses the phenomenon known in syntax as ‘clitic climbing’. It explains why both monosyllabic clitics and the clitic loro need not be an argument of the verbs they attach to. The attachment of the clitic to the modal verb, as in Lo voglio leggere ‘I want to read it’, is derived through argument composition according to which modal verbs inherit the subcategorization requirements of the embedded verb.

Finally, the book is rounded out with an appendix offering twenty pages of clitic combinations extracted from the Italian Reference Corpus, as well as a bibliography, a name index, and a subject index.

Overall, this book carefully examines the inflectional properties of clitics and argues that monosyllabic clitic pronouns behave like verbal affixes. Within this inflectional approach to cliticization, the term ‘clitic’ is regarded as a descriptive cover term, given that both monosyllabic and bisyllabic clitics are assimilated into existing categories.