French Object Clitics: A Multimodal Analysis

Clitic systems pose particularly challenging problems for a theory of grammatical reasoning because of the intricate way in which their grammatical organization interleaves the dimensions of form and meaning. In this paper we present an account of French object clitics within the framework of multimodal categorial grammar logic as developed by Moortgat, Oehrle and Morrill ((8], 6], 9], 10]). The central components of the analysis are the following. (i) Clitics are assigned second-order pronoun types. The binding of argument slots in the thematic structure of the predicates they combine with is accounted for in terms of hypothetical reasoning. (ii) Clitics attach to their hosts in terms of head adjunction. The identiication of heads is governed by modal control operators. The clitic-host combinations are realized in terms of the interaction postulates governing communication between head adjunction and regular phrasal composition. (iii) Linear order constraints within the clitic cluster are handled by netuning the distributivity laws regulating the percolation of the head control features through head adjunction and regular phrasal composition conngurations. 1 Facts on clitics \In most languages, there are certain morphemes which are problematic because they have a status which is neither obviously that of an independent word, nor that of an aax. Such morphemes appear to have an intermediate status between these two well established categories. Typically, they do not have the autonomy of a normal word and mustìean' on an adjacent word, the host. The special status of such items was recognized by comparative and structuralist linguists who called them clitics." With this characterization, given by Miller in his dissertation ((4]), we take a rst step towards a description of clitics. The purpose of the present Section is to brieey review the constructions in which they can occur, contrasting these with constructions in which they cannot. We will concentrate here on clitic pronouns, in view of the fact that the emphasis in the present work will be almost exclusively on a subset of those pronouns: the French object clitics. Clitics are pronouns in their weak form. French pronouns can be classiied as weak or strong forms. and genetive or quantitative en (1a), while the latter consists of the corresponding strong forms moi, toi, lui, elle, nous, vous, eux, elles and cela (1b). Not all clitics have a corresponding strong pronoun, like for example y, which replaces a combination of the preposition a and a normal NP. (a) Je …