Historical overview

Abstract

The chapter overviews the evolution from Latin pronouns to present-day object clitics. The discussion of Latin focuses on the relationship between pronominal syntax and three main factors: information packaging, verb movement, and the licensing of null objects. Then the chapter examines the earliest Romance documents (eighth–ninth century) and elaborates on the distinction between archaic and innovative early Romance languages. The former allowed interpolation, i.e. the presence of material between proclitics and the verb, while the latter exhibited adverbal clitics, which are always attached to a verbal host. The loss of enclisis/proclisis alternations in finite clauses (Tobler-Mussafia effects) marks the transition towards modern systems. Further variation across modern vernaculars results from clitic climbing, which is often lost in restructuring contexts and, to a lesser extent, in compound and simple tenses. Lastly, the chapter overviews several systematic changes affecting the order of sequences formed by two or more object clitics.