A Linguist's Linguist: Studies in South Slavic Linguistics in Honor of E. Wayles Brown

The Genitive-of-Quantification Clitic in Siovenian

The Genitive-of-Quantification Clitic in Siovenian* Marija Golden and Milena Milojevic Sheppard 1. Introduction Slavic second position cliticization has been an area of vibrant research in generative grammar dating from Wayles Browne's seminal 1968 article . Since then, a standard approach to second position (2P) or "Wackernagel" clause-mate clitics has evolved which assumes, within the framework of the minimalist theory of grammar, that clitic clustering in 2P follows from the prosodic properties of clitics (Franks 1998, Boskovic 2001, and related work). Pointedly, the 2P effect is proposed to follow from the phonological requirement that clitics be initial in their intonation phrase, (1a), combined with the parametrized direction of cliticization. Serbo-Croatian (SC) clitics, for example, are specified in the lexicon as suffixes, (lb), whereas Slovenian clitics are identified as both suffixes and prefixes, (lc), (Boskovic 2001: 83; 156). (1) a. #__ b. suffix c. suffix/ prefix (SC) (Slovenian) The standard approach also assumes that the relative order of clitics in the surface structure follows from the positions they come to occupy through regular feature-checking syntactic movement in the minimalist theory of morphosyntactic sentence structure. Building on the copy theory of movement (Chomsky 1993, 1995) and allowing for the pronunciation of lower chain links, the standard approach holds that 2P clitics do not undergo any specific cluster-forming syntactic * We thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Steven Franks, Vrinda Chidambaram, and Brian Joseph, eds. A Linguist's Linguist: Studies in South Slavic Linguistics in Honor of E. Wayles Browne. Bloomington, IN: Siavica, 23551 . 236 MARIJA GOLDEN AND MILENA MILOJEVIC SHEPPARD movement to single position once they land in their feature-checking positions. In this paper we examine the potential of the standard approach to account for the placement of the Genitive of Quantification (GQ) clitic in Slovenian. In (2a), the GQ clitic jih 'them' is dislocated from the NP which contains both the numeral and the clitic in its base generated position and appears to have joined the 2P clause-mate clitic group, d. (2a) with a non-clitic numeral NP in (2b)1 (2) a. Janez mu jih je dal pet. Janez himOA T themGEN is given five 'Janez gave him five of them.' b. Janez mu je dal pet knjig. Janez himOAT is given five books 'Janez gave him five books.' Our analysis of the Slovenian GQ clitic is based on BoskoviC's 2006b, 2008 analysis of Russian and Serbo-Croatian (non-clitic) numeral NPs. The recent interest in GQ has provided valuable insight into the workings of case and agreement systems. We believe that it can also contribute to our understanding of 2P placement of Slovenian pronominal clitics as well as 2P clitics in general. To the best of our knowledge, clitics that originate in numeral NPs have not yet attracted systematic attention in Wackernagel clitic research. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 is an extension of BoskoviC's analysis of the GQ numeral NP to Slovenian. Section 3 discusses the 2P placement of the Slovenian GQ clitic. Section 4 concludes the paper. 2. The Genitive-of-Quantification Numeral Noun Phrase In Slovenian, cardinal numerals generally display adjectival agreement with the noun. Both, the numeral 'three' and the noun 'girl' in the subject phrase in (3) are in the morphological nominative case; they also agree in number (plural) and gender (feminine). Agreement in case, number, and gender obtains also in the object numeral NP in (3): 1 In this article, clitics appear in italics, the GQ clitic in boldface. TH EGENITI VE-OF-Q UANTIFICATION (LiTIC IN SLOVENIAN 237 the numeral 'five' and the noun 'boys' are both in the morphological dative case, plural, and masculine. Because of their adjectival type of agreement with the head noun, numerals have traditionally been described as inflecting adjectival modifiers of nouns in NPs. (3) Tri deklice so pomagale petim deckom. threeNoM.pL.F girlsNOM.pL.F are helped3PL.F fiveDAT.PL boysDAT.PL.M 'Three girls helped five boys.' Traditional Slovenian grammar (Toporisic 1976/2000) also observes that higher numerals do not follow the adjectival agreement pattern when the numeral NP is in subject or object position. When a subject or an object numeral NP contains a higher numeral, the numeral is said to be in the syncretic nominative/accusative case, and the complement noun in the "genitive of quantification" case. In (4), the numeral 'five' is in...