The series Studies in Language Change presents empirically based research that extends knowledge about historical relations among the world's languages without restriction to any particular language family or region. While not devoted explicitly to theoretical explanations, the series hopes to contribute to the advancement in understandings of language change as well as adding to the store of well-analysed historical-comparative data on the world's languages. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

"The syntax of clitics in Spanish has long been a topic of discussion amongst linguists. There are two traditionally held syntactic approaches for accounting for Spanish clitics: the movement approach and the base-generation approach. Both approaches succeed in capturing certain properties of clitics, but fail in capturing other properties. The literature suggests that 3rd person direct object clitics appear to function as determiners, whereas all other clitics function more as agreement markers. Taking this into account, I propose that the movement approach applies to 3rd person direct object clitics, and that all other clitics are base-generated. In this thesis, I provide a syntactic analysis of both approaches, the movement approach for 3rd person direct object clitics and the base-generation approach for all other clitics. Ultimately, it appears that both approaches can account for these clitics, although there are still a couple of minor problems with the movement approach, which pertain to the motivation for the clitic to move higher up in the syntax once having its agreement features checked, in order to arrive at its surface position."--

In light of recent attempts to revive the operation of syntactic head movement and clitic movement in Phase Theory (Roberts 2010a, 2012), we argue that object clitics are underlyingly determiners in the syntax. Clitics engage in probe/goal relations to value and delete their uninterpretable Case features, and upon Agree, cliticize to their host via head-to-head incorporation. Although this account adopts the bare phrase structure theoretic mechanism employed by Ian Roberts to instantiate head movement (i.e., `defective goals'), the work outlined here diverges from the details of Roberts's account, most crucially by positing Abstract Case features on clitics. Based on clitic constructions from Standard Spanish, and various dialects, it will be demonstrated that the behavior of clitics, like that of other nominal elements, is governed by general abstract conditions on movement, namely Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 2013), Case Theory and the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 2001, 2004, 2008). After a careful rethinking of well-known intervention and impenetrability effects (i.e., islands) involving clitics in Spanish, it is claimed that their movement, although unique in being both maximal and minimal, otherwise conforms to the standard conditions imposed on determiner phrases more generally. Contrary to recently influential Base Generation accounts, this work makes a case for distinguishing clitic movement from the movement of doubles, through a detailed study of Exceptional Case-Marking (ECM) constructions, where multiple clitic arguments can raise to object (Chomsky 2013). The complex array of possibilities involving clitic placement in these structures exemplifies the interaction of clitics with Case assignment and distinguishes the minimal nature of clitic head movement from XP movement of doubles. Finally, Chomsky's theory of Inheritance (2008) figures crucially in this account, as it is used to explain the order of clitics in clusters of two and three. Inheritance is also used to explain island effects that block clitic climbing. This study concludes by making the case that while in certain dialects, such as Los Angeles Vernacular Spanish (Parodi 2009a, 2011), clitics have apparently evolved into agreement/object markers, in most dialects, including the Standard, both direct object (DO) and indirect object (IO) clitics are argument pronouns that move to their derived positions in the syntax. Such pronominal clitics are contrasted with truly base-generated `morpheme' clitics, including `inherently' reflexive clitics and `speaker' ethical dative clitics (Strozer 1976), which cannot be doubled or related by the syntax to a corresponding stressed argument. The account that fellows then, although firmly within the movement tradition of clitics (Kayne 1975, Quicoli 1976) is intended to complement morphological approaches to clitic clustering with non-argument clitics (Cuervo 2013), and to shed light on the workings of the interface that relates the narrow syntax to the phonological component of the grammar.

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

First published in 1995. This investigation shows that cliticization is not a totally unified phenomenon. Asymmetries in the behaviour of phonological and syntactic clitics show that no single principle predicts all clitic behaviour. The study explores the idea that modifications to the original five parameter system of analysis can be altered to a more efficient analysis in terms of three parameters. This title will be of interest to students of phonetics and phonology.

The introduction to this volume by Anders Holmberg provides a reflection on movement in the light of recent developments in Minimalist theory. His discussion of the theories of category versus feature movement in terms of displacement and copying, provides the background for 12 papers dealing with clitics, pronouns and movement in variety of language families. Articles on Romance include papers on the genitive clitic in Andean Spanish, proclitic groups and word order in Caribbean Spanish, overt pronouns and empty categories in Brazilian Portuguese, the clitic en in Catalan, and clitic doubling in Romanian. Papers on Germanic discuss movement of verbal complements in Dutch and German, analyses of English finite auxiliaries in syntax and phonology, and complementizers in dialects of German in a reiterative syntax analysis. Other articles deal with object shift in Serbo-Croatian, operator-bound clitics in Niuean, a serial verb analysis of the ba construction in Mandarin Chinese, and experiencer verbs in Japanese.