Towards a Syntactic Understanding of Prosodically Reduced Pronouns

Prosodically reduced pronouns come in two forms, “weak” and “clitic,” both differing from non-reduced “strong” pronouns. Both of these also occur in Westgermanic dialects and exhibit different properties which cannot always be unambiguously disentangled. The theoretical framework presented here allows us a straightforward disambiguation: reduced pronominal elements in the left periphery must be clitics, while those below cannot. The functional head F, encoding “point-of-view,” serves as the licensing position for clitics which are here taken to be heads; weak pronouns, maximal phrases in the overt syntax, cliticize at LF. Movement to F is driven by the need to compensate for underspecified φ-feature information.