Parallel Morpho - Syntactic Constraints in European Portuguese

1 Abstract In this paper I shall propose an account of morphosyntactic phenomena like European Por-tuguese (hence: EP) cliticization in terms of interacting morphophonological and surface-syntactic constraints. In particular, I suggest that mor-phophonological constraints are partially under-speciied with respect to morpheme linearization, information that will be added monotonically by surface syntactic constraints. Moreover, I will argue that, rst, a purely lexicalist treatment of the morphosyntax of clitics in EP is quite diicult, if not impossible, to formulate, and, second, that the use of order domains provides us with a handy 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 deened which enables us to express the basic intuitions of the lexicalist hypothesis. 1 Morpho-syntactic Properties of EP Clitics Within current surface-oriented lexical frameworks , the standard approach to cliticization phenomena in Romance assumes that aaxation of pronominal clitics to their verbal hosts should be conceived of as an instance of lexical alternation. Consequently, under the analysis proposed by e.g. Miller and Sag (1995) these phenomena are dealt with in terms of lexical rules. This assumption, which conforms to the Lexical Integrity Principle (Bresnan and Mchombo, 1994), seems to be well-motivated, given that clitic constructions in Romance typically display morphophonological idiosyncrasies and certain other phenomena generally attributed to the lexical level. Under this perspective, cliticization data from EP exhibit a rather unexpected behavior: on one hand, clitics give rise to morphophonological alternations of their host (comprar+o ! comprr a-lò to buy it') , they may aaect the stress pattern of their host (tu fAzes + o ! tu fazE-lò you do it ') , and vowel-initial clitics undergo epenthesis of a nasal consonant after nasal vowels (eles con-hecem + o / a ! eles conhecem-no /-nà they know him / her ').