Cliticization in European Portuguese using parallel morpho-syntactic constraints

In this paper I shall propose an account of morphosyntactic phenomena like European Portuguese (henceforth: EP) cliticization in terms of interacting morphological and surface-syntactic constraints. In particular, I suggest that morphological constraints are partially underspecified with respect to morpheme linearization, information that will be added monotonically by surface syntactic constraints. Moreover, I will argue that, first, a purely lexicalist treatment of the morphosyntax of clitics in EP is quite difficult, if not impossible, to formulate, and, second, that the use of order domains provides us with a convenient representation for modelling the surface-syntactic constraints that determine the exact positioning of the clitics in the morphosyntactic complex. Finally, a lexically-constrained morpho-syntax interface is defined which enables us to express the basic intuitions of the lexicalist hypothesis.