Spelling out clitics in Kambera

This paper presents a case study in the positional properties of a complex set of clitics: the mood, pronominal, and clausal-aspect clitics in the Austronesian language Kambera. The clitics of this language may form a cluster of maximally nine clitics. The positional properties of the clitics can be distinguished into two distinct categories: (a) the position of the clitic cluster as a whole with respect to its host, and (b) the position of the clitics within the cluster with reference to each other. The aim of this paper is to present an account of both these aspects of Kambera clitic placement. The placement of the cluster as a whole will be characterized syntactically, while the ordering of the clitics within the cluster has the characteristics of inflectional morphology. I argue that the placement of the Kambera clitics with respect to each other is the result neither of the syntactic manipulation of terminal elements of functional categories, nor of lexical word-formation rules or position-class morphology, nor is it determined by the phonological properties of the language alone. Instead, it is the result of the morphological spell-out of morphosyntactic feature bundles (Anderson 1992) at the end of the syntactic derivation, at the interface between syntax and prosody: the postlexical level