Romanian definite articles are not clitics

The central claim of this paper is that the postposed definite article in Romanian is a genuine inflectional suffix. To justify this claim, we show that the status of the article that is commonly assumed in the literature is inadequate in two respects. First, the article is not a second position clitic. Second, the numerous syntactic analyses that involve movement of the adjective phrase in order to account for the combination of article and adjective make wrong empirical predictions. Instead, we provide a lexical analysis within the theory of Minimalist Morphology that accounts for both the morphological behaviour and the syntactic distribution of the article. We finally show that the analysis carries over to Albanian and Bulgarian, although the definite articles of these neighbouring languages are also usually reported as being second position clitics.