Parallel Morpho-Syntactic Constraints in European Portuguese Cliticization

Within current surface-oriented lexical frameworks, the standard approach to cliticization phenomena in Romance assumes that affixation of pronominal clitics to their verbal hosts should be conceived of as an instance of lexical alternation. Consequently, under the analyses proposed by e.g. Miller and Sag (1995) and Monachesi (1996) these phenomena are dealt with in terms of lexical rules. This assumption, which conforms to the Lexical Integrity Principle (Bresnan and Mchombo, 1995), appears to be well-motivated, given that clitic constructions in Romance typically display a variety of properties generally attributed to the lexical level, among them morphophonological and semantic idiosyncrasies. European Portuguese (EP), however, poses a challenge for the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis in that morphophonology, semantics and most of morphotactics suggest an affixal status of these elements, whereas the linearization of the clitics with respect to their host depends on entirely syntactic factors, i.e. the presence vs. absence of certain syntactic constituents in a circumscribed surface-syntactic domain. I shall argue that the grammar of EP clitic placement cannot be satisfactorily accounted for in a purely lexicalist fashion. Rather, morphology and syntax should