The Cyclic Integration approach to clitics and the syntax-prosody mapping

• Applicant: Dr. Philipp Weisser
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439622645

Throughout the first phase of the project, I provided a comprehensive typology of non-canonical placement of coordinators. As could be shown, the crosslinguistic variation of this phenomenon mirrored the variation of clausal second position elements and clause-level clitics argued for in the literature. The typology of non-canonical coordinator placement patterns was thus the first crosslinguistic study of clitics that kept the morphosyntactic category of the element under investigation constant. This new methodological approach allowed us to test quite number of possible variables that the literature has argued to have an effect on clitic placement. Based on this study of shifting coordinators, I proposed a general model of clitic placement in the world’s languages that approaches the phenomenon as an interface phenomenon. Second position elements (and clause-level clitics more generally) appear in their non-canonical positions as the result of postsyntactic dislocation operations applying during the mappings from syntax to prosody in order to satisfy subcategorization features of specific morphemes. This goal of this project is threefold. First, we want to expand the empirical coverage of the model at hand by looking at second position effects of an entirely new phenonemon, namely second position effects of polar question markers. We will take over the methodology developed for coordinators and provide a second typology of non-canonical placement possibilities of a specific morphosyntactic category that has not received a lot of attention in the literature so far. The phenomenon of question markers promises to add a new dimension to the existing typology but at the same time offers the possibility for a close comparison with coordinators. The second goal is to show that the Cyclic Integration approach developed in the first phase of the project can be understood as a coherent and comprehensive framework of clitic phenomena more generally. We will expand the empirical coverage of the model by looking at relevant case studies about clitics and related phenomena from the literature and investigate in detail if and how these case studies can be modelled with the approach in this project. Finally, the third goal of the project is to strengthen the claim that an adequate model of clitic placement is ideally couched in a broader model of the mapping from syntax to prosody. The previous project phase argued at length that clitics are most adequately viewed as cyclic elements and it has proven crucial that the above-mentioned dislocation operation applies cyclically at a specific step in these mapping procedures. In line with our findings about clitics, we will propose a strictly cyclic model of the syntax-prosody mapping and explore its properties.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5175: Cyclic Optimization