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The placement of second-position subject clitics in Alsea

This paper aims to spell out the post-syntactic operations involved in the placement of second-position subject clitics in Alsea, an extinct language of the central Oregon coast. It assumes that the subject clitic is a syntactic head that is moved to a complementizer position in syntax, but is linearized in a post-syntactic morphological component in PF; operations in morphology account for the deviation of the subject clitic from its syntactic output position. Based on Buckley (1994), this paper proposes a two-stage post-syntactic derivation to account for the subject clitic distribution in Alsea: (i) concatenation, in which the subject clitic adjoins to an adjacent head of the same type to satisfy its suffixal requirement, (ii) prosodic readjustment, whereby a clitic whose morphological host is non-overt, leans rightward to procliticize to the first prosodic constituent.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/139409
Date January 2011
CreatorsSui, Yanyan
ContributorsUniversity of Pennsylvania
PublisherUniversity of Arizona Linguistics Circle
Source SetsUniversity of Arizona
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, text

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