A syntactic view of Romance pronominal sequences

This article deals with the question of pronominal clitic clustering in Romance — French, Italian and Spanish. In spite of the Variation displayed in clitic ordering among Romance languages, some striking generalizations obtain (in proclisis): (a) thirdperson object clitic combinations exhibit peculiarities: the specific order le lui äs opposed to me le in French, the one-word sequence glielo/-a/-e/-i in Italian and the spurious se rule in Spanish (se lo/-a/-os/-as); (b) a thirdperson object clitic in combination is dose r to the host (that is, verb or auxiliary) than afirst/secondperson object clitic; (c) the me lui constraint: the combination ofa thirdperson dative object clitic with a first/second person object clitic is prohibited. I will propose a syntaxbased analysis of clitic ordering and co-occurrence restrictions within the Principles and Parameters framework of Government and Binding syntax. The analysis of (a) and (b) relies on a distinction between lexically Case-marked clitics (third person clitics) and clitics unspecified for objective Case (first/second person clitics). This distinction is relevant to the way these clitics are syntactically derived, and also to the way they incorporate into their host. The analysis of(c) (and also ofthe weaker I-II constraint which ajfects the combination of first/second object clitics) is based on a Relativized Minimality application to the referential value of the combined clitics. Final ly, I propose to extend my approach to prepositional clitics by making use ofa (inherent) Case-frame dictating the order of incorporation for each clitic in combination. 1. The research reported here is supported by a fund from le Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique, grant 12-32293.91.1 would like to thank the linguistic group working on the project "Pronoms clitiques et structure de phrase" at the University of Geneva: Marc-Ariel Friedemann, Tali Siloni, Adriana Belletti, and particularly Luigi Rizzi for helpful and detailed comments. I am also indebted to Ur Shlonsky, Robin Clark, Teresa Guasti and two anonymous Probus reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of the paper. Finally, I am grateful to Manuela Schoenenberger who checked the English of the present paper. Probus 5 (1993), 241 -270 0921 -4471/93/0005-0241 © Walter de Gruyter