Clitics in the Languages of Europe (review)

Unlike other volumes in its series which I have seen, e.g. Constituent order in the languages of Europe (ed. by Anna Siewierska, 1998) and Word prosodic systems in the languages of Europe (ed. by Harry van der Hulst, 1999), this collection is largely theory-driven and does not cover the genetic diversity of Europe with any degree of thoroughness. A better title would have been Clitics in universal grammar, the main title of the project whose questionnaire provided the data on which the articles here are based. It would not have been a surprise, then, to find that the large majority of data considered come from the Romance, Germanic, and Slavonic languages, which have been the focus of generative research on clitic pronouns.

After Henk van Riemsdijk’s informative introduction to the present status of generative research on clitics (1–30), Part 1 of the volume contains three area studies: Anna Cardinaletti (33–82) examines pronouns in the Germanic and Romance languages and concludes that the weak pronouns of Germanic cannot be treated like the clitic pronouns of Romance, leading her to suggest a tripartite typology for pronouns: clitic, weak, and strong; Mila Dimo-trova-Vulchanova (83–122) provides a survey of clitics in the Slavic languages (save for Polish); and Lars Hellen and Christer Platzack (123–42) scrutinize the pronouns of the Scandinavian languages and find that weak and clitic pronouns have the same distribution.

The remainder of the volume, save for the questionnaire and responses to it (891–1009), is devoted to articles of theoretical concern. Part 2 begins with two feature articles, each followed by six peer comments and a reply by the respective authors: Anna Cardinaletti and Michal Starke (145–233) propose that three classes of pronouns—clitic, weak, strong—are distinguished by a regular range of semantic oppositions and that clitic pronouns are structurally deficient vis-à-vis weak pronouns, which, in turn, are structurally deficient vis-à-vis strong pronouns. Joseph Edmonds (291–367) argues that clitic pronouns are base-generated in situ as alternative realizations of full phrases, a position with which most of the commentators disagree.

The remaining articles are subdivided into five ‘Topics’: ‘Clitic clusters and the Wackernagel position’ (429–540, three articles); ‘Functional categories and the position of clitics’ (543–708, five articles); ‘Clitics and scrambling’ (711–57, two articles); ‘Semantic features’ (761–861, two articles); and ‘Phonological aspects’ (865–87, one article). I found particularly interesting Ian Roberts’s argument (621–37), based on Welsh and Romance data, that clitics are base-generated in situ in some languages, e.g. Welsh, but move in others, e.g. the Romance languages, and Marina Nespor’s proposal (865–87) that three types of clitics may be distinguished ‘according to the component(s) of the grammar in which they are dependent on a host: either syntax or phonology or both’.

Unfortunately, the volume could have used an additional round of proofing; for a number of articles are missing references in their bibliographies, and some could have been made more user-friendly. Having to pause to interpret example sentences which are parsed, but without translation, or vice-versa, certainly hampered my reading.