Clitic Phenomena in European Languages (review)

The essays in this volume are mostly about cliticization in South Slavic (i.e. Macedonian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian). The introduction, by Steven Franks (1–46), discusses interface phenomena in South Slavic and examine show to best analyze the interaction between different components of grammar. Franks argues that an analysis of cliticization should combine insights from derivational syntax with representational work in optimality theory (OT). Theoretically, the position is taken that the proper place for OT in the grammar is at the interface between different components.

Within the group of papers on South Slavic, ŽEljko Bošković (71–119) examines the mechanisms triggering clitic placement in Serbo-Croatian. After discussing the purely syntactic analysis and the purely prosodic reordering mechanism, he reaches the conclusion that placement mechanisms are phonological in nature. In ‘Where do clitics cluster?’, Ljiljana Progovac (249–58) writes a short reply to Bošković’s claim that second position clitic placement in Serbo-Croatian is phonological. She argues instead that both syntactic positions and intonation boundaries play an important role in determining where Serbo-Croatian clitics appear.

Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova (121–46) compares possessive clitics in English and Bulgarian, and argues that the difference between them is due to the nature of the clitic head: while English genitive ’s is nonreferential (realizing functional categories), the Bulgarian clitic is referential (i.e. pronominal). Marija Golden and Milena M. Sheppard (191–207) show that Slovenian pronominal clitics depart from prototypical second-position clitics as found in Serbo-Croatian, providing distributional evidence from the clitic systems of both languages to support this claim.

Clitic doubling is addressed in Ivana P. Schick’s essay on Bulgarian (259–92). Comparing Bulgarian and Macedonian, she claims that clitic pronouns act consistently as topic markers and participate in the interpretation of information stucture. In the last essay on Slavic, ‘On clitic sites’ (293–316), Olga M. Tomić argues that Macedonian has both verbal and Wackernagel clitics, unlike other European languages with only verbal clitics. Tomić is mostly concerned with deriving the positions of both types of clitics within a derivational view of syntax.

There are also essays on cliticization in Spanish, Greek, and Albanian. Artemis Alexiadou and Elena Anagnostopoulou (47–70) examine Greek restrictive relatives introduced by the complementizer pu. The crucial question addressed here is why only direct objects are sensitive to the indefiniteness of the head. Jon Franco (147–89), who looks at clitic doubling with respect to Spanish, takes the position that object clitics should be analyzed as agreement morphemes on the verb (on a par with subject agreement markers), rather than as phonologically dependent pronominal arguments. Dalina Kallulli’s (210–48) paper on clitic doubling focuses on Albanian and Greek. In contrast to Jon Franco’s position, Kallulli argues that clitic doubling and object agreement, despite the similarities, constitute distinct phenomena, particularly because doubled DPs behave like topics. She also discusses the information structure of clitic doubling and specificity.

Other topics addressed in this volume include the difference in status between clitic pronouns and auxiliary clitics, and the nature of the functional features instantiated by clitics. Most of the contributions in this volume were originally presented at the fourth conference of the European Society for the Study of English, held at the Lajos Lossuth University in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1997.