French Clitic Movement Without Clitics or Movement

The French clitic system has posed a persistent challenge to transformational syntactic analysis, which has never produced a successful account of problems such as clitic ordering. Lexicalist alternatives, however, have never been reconciled with the full range of familiar problems and the growing body of known lexical idiosyncracies. We present a lexicalist treatment of the French clitic system that treats alìclitics' as lexical pronominal aaxes, whose ordering is templatic in nature. On our account, the order of French pronominal aaxes is independent of the general properties of syntactic structures; cliticized words, derived from verbal lexemes in keeping with general type constraints, enter the syntax fully innected. The conclusions we reach challenge grammatical architectures that seek to explain the behavior of clitics in terms of functional projections, head movement and/or the Mirror Principle.