Deconstructing dative clitics

In this paper I investigate the properties in Romance languages of dative clitics, with a focus on the internal structure of third person dative clitics in Catalan. These clitics show a number of structural and distributive irregularities that seem to reveal something fundamental missing from the picture. By looking at their morphological structure, I will show that we can do a decomposition of (at least Catalan) dative clitics into simpler components, which I will show that include features like definiteness and deixis. This inquiry will allow us to extract some generalizations on the structure of Romance dative clitics and, perhaps on the nature of dative case itself.