Proclitic contexts in European Portuguese and their effect on clitic placement

The preverbal and postverbal placement of clitic pronouns in European Portuguese is determined by any one of a specific set of words and phrases in preverbal position. Existing studies by Vigario (1999), Gerlach (2001) and Crysmann (2002) argue that an inflectional analysis of European Portuguese (EP) cliticisation is untenable on the grounds that proclitic triggers are not readily available to the morphology. This paper builds on an earlier analysis by Luis and Sadler (2003) and argues that the syntactic conditioning of proclisis can and should be accounted for without invalidating the inflectional status of the pronominal clitic system in EP. The proclitic contexts are defined in terms of f-precedence relations. These are mapped onto the morphology and put in correspondence with the morphological placement function. The interaction between inflectional morphology and f-structure information is formalised within the architecture of Lexical Functional Grammar in combination with the realizational theory of Paradigm Function Morphology, following insights by Sadler and Spencer (2001), Luis and Sadler (2003), Sadler and Nordlinger (2004), Otoguro (2003) and Luis (2004). In connection with EP proclisis, we also discuss the c-structure representation of phrasal affixes. We assume that proclitics constitute phrasal inflections and argue that their partly syntactic and partly morphological properties follow from a mismatch between the morphological token structure and c-structure syntax.