Warlpiri and the theory of second position clitics

This paper examines the placement of aspect and agreement clitics in Warlpiri. A common misconception regarding clitic placement in Warlpiri is cleared up: clitic placement does not depend on syllable count. It is also shown that these clitics do not uniformly appear in second position, syntactically or phonologically, making the standard label of “second position clitics” a misnomer. An analysis is developed in terms of syntactic head movement combined with local morphological reordering. The discussion also reveals a genuine morphological first word phenomenon, whereby a preverb may be split from its associated verb.

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