On the Representation of French and Italian Clitics

0. Introduction Romance clitics, and more precisely, clitic pronouns, have been a topic in generative linguistics since the seventies. For linguists like Perlmutter (1971) and Kayne (1975), their most striking property was their linear order, which is different from the order of the phrases that realize the same grammatical functions. The direct object, e.g., follows the verb when it is noun phrase, but precedes it when it is a clitic pronoun. Given the basic assumption of the generative theory of that period, accounts were proposed in terms of derivations from canonical abstract representations of the sentences containing them. In more recent work, the focus has shifted from how clitics how can be derived to how they are to be represented. New proposals on the treatment of Romance clitics have been made in the framework of optimality theory (OT, Grimshaw 1997) and of feature and exponence theories, also known under the label of Distributed Morphology (Monachesi 1999, 2000, Everett 2000, Luís & Sadler 2001).