Brief study of the category of clitics in romance languages

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-8420.2016v17n1p86

Clitics (or unstressed personal pronouns) are elements that can indicate, among other constituents, internal verbal arguments. However, they do not exhibit the same behavior as the DPs (or PPs) that receive the thematic role assigned by the verb, which is mainly due to the fact that clitics do not occupy the same syntactic position that those constituents do. Also they do not have strictly the same behavior in different lan­guages: for example, there are languages that put clitics on proclisis in situations where other languages put them at enclisis to the verb, or languages that have locative and gen­itive / partitive clitics, unlike others. In this work, Romance languages, among them Bra­zilian Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and French, are taken in consideration in tests that briefly prove the nuclear character of clitics.