Forceº, Finitenessº and the placement of clitics in Western Iberian Romance languages

Abstract

This article examines the post- and preverbal clitic alternations (traditionally, enclisis and proclisis) found in Western Iberian Romance languages (WI), that is in Galician, European Portuguese and Asturian. These clitic alternations have been traditionally analyzed assuming clitics in these languages are phonologically enclitic – that is, as clitics requiring a phonological host to their left. Alternatively, other analyses have capitalized on a syntactically triggered verb-movement past the clitic to a projection in the left-periphery, blocked under certain conditions. Summarizing part of the research developed in Fernández Rubiera (2009), this article presents new data from different varieties of Asturian where postverbal clitics can also be found in the finite embedded context, a clitic pattern that speakers of Galician and European Portuguese report as marginal or ungrammatical. Empirical evidence from these varieties of Asturian supports an analysis of post- and preverbal clitic alternations in terms of syntactic movement to Finitenessº (cf. Rizzi 1997, 2004) either as an instance of A’-movement or by Xº-movement of a closer head to this left-peripheral projection. In turn, this analysis can be naturally extended to explain the different interpretations that post- and preverbal clitics give rise to in the finite embedded contexts in which both options are grammatical for speakers of what I call Conservative Asturian (CAst). Finally, I briefly show how the analysis proposed predicts crosslinguistic variation within WI in the finite embedded context, which I claim to be ultimately related to differences in the complementizer system in the languages under study.