The Spanish pronominal clitic system

In this paper we present a model of the Spanish pronominal clitic system. We start with a review of the phenomenon, including simple and complex clitic climbing and the related phenomena of reflexives, and also the impersonal passive-reflexive and activeimpersonal forms. Then, we review the status of pronominal clitics and propose that it is a dual phenomenon: on the one hand, enclitics are inflections while proclitics are proper clitics that are realized as independent lexical units. Then a model of the clitic system and its formalization in HPSG is presented. The main result is the statement of the Spanish pronominal clitic principle: Spanish clitic sentences have a single phonological host that has within its scope a single concrete or abstract clitic host per independent clitic domain; abstract clitic hosts are produced by the operations of clitic composition and clitic subsumption, that are also introduced in this paper. We show how this principle accounts for the structure of Spanish pronominal clitic sentences and related phenomena. We also present the implementation of the theory in LKB.