The exaptative origin of pronominal clitics
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Abstract
Contemporary Spanish pronominal clitics and their syntactic characteristics are the result of several grammatical changes that have been following one another since Latin and have brought about a wide range of readjustment processes due to the need of satisfying formal requirements imposed by the cognitive systems which are part of the Language Faculty. Because of their structural nature and their non-specific function, clitics can be conceptualized as an «exaptation», that is as an evolutionary novelty whose emergence is a side effect of the internal structure of grammar, that has suffered changes in several aspects such as the pronominal system, the sentence word order and the interpretation of infinitive clauses.
DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.15304/verba.42.1214
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