Marginal clitics

This paper is concerned with a set of cases involving pronominal clitic forms in various languages which have not received much attention in the literature and which we refer to, for descriptive purposes, as “marginal” pronominal clitics. The general hypothesis developed is that regular clitics can acquire a marginal status as the result of an alteration of their formal feature composition which triggers compensation from the semantics. In other words, marginal clitics make a semantic contribution to the string while regular clitics make a formal contribution. Following an approach to the composition of lexical entries based on Minimalist assumptions, we argue: 1) that marginal clitics include a semantic component that is not found in the descriptions of regular clitics; and 2) that the development of a semantic component in the lexical entry of a regular clitic is accompanied by a fixation and/or reduction in its formal feature composition. The main goal of this paper is not to offer detailed analyses but rather to propose a general approach to this marginalization process. This approach, we believe, can provide a useful tool to be used in the description of clitic systems across languages. To support this, we present a set of case studies in Modern Greek, Niuean and French.