A Person First constraint on the linearization of clitics
Kate Mooney
August 2022
 

In this paper, I examine person and case discontinuities in the pronominal clitics of Yulparija, a Pama-Nyungan language. I argue that these discontinuities arise from syntactic movement. This movement creates parallel sets of discontinuities at the clausal level and within individual clitics, and suggests that the motivation for this movement applies equally across multiple levels of structure. To capture this, I propose Person First, a condition on syntactic movement that causes highly-ranked person features to move leftwards during Spellout. Unlike competing alternatives, Person First is able to capture flanking and non-flanking orders (cf. Harbour 2008) while also predicting strong person-left tendencies. For Yulparija, this analysis explains why person discontinuities only arise in second-person duals and exclusives. This account thus provides a way to connect the morphological composition of pronominal clitics to their clausal behavior, suggesting that the order of clitics may not be not as arbitrary as previously thought.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006758
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Manuscript, comments welcome
keywords: clitics, discontinuous agreement, spanning, person hierarchies, spellout, morphology, syntax
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