Clitic combinations

Abstract

One of the major sources of microvariation is the ordering of combinations formed by two or more clitics. Diachronically, cross-linguistic variation increased over time because certain Romance languages have undergone a change, reversing the order of some clitic combinations (in particular, those containing a third person accusative element or the clitic en/ne). The chapter entertains the hypothesis that variation is due to a change in the syntactic structure whereby clitics are nested within clause structure (Kayne 1994). Clitics were originally nested in a separate position, while later on they began to form a single complex head. This change, which took place at a different pace and not in all the Romance languages, caused the emergence of various subclasses of clitic combinations, which differ in syntactic and morphological respects.