In recent work on Romance clitics, the focus has shifted from how they can be derived to how they can be represented. New proposals have been made in the framework of optimality theory (Grimshaw 1997) and of feature and exponence theories (Monachesi 1999, Everett 2000). It will be argued that the classical view, according to which Romance clitics are visible elements of c-structure is adequate. But under this assumption, two sets of descriptive fats still nedd to be accounted for: the restrictions and idiosyncrasies of clitic clusters, and the high ambiguity and syncretism of clitics. Regarding clitic clusters, a treatment will be proposed in which their complexity is expressed at the f-structure level only. Systematic functional ambiguity is treated, in some cases, as derivation within the lexicon via lexical rules. In other cases lexical underspecification is posited, which is resolved by conditional constraints at the f-structure level. Representations for all types of clitics will be proposed, including Fr. en and y, It. ne and ci (which are not taken into account in Grimshaw 1987), showing that LFG provides the right formal mix to account for the use of clitics in Romance: direct lexical encoding in combination with the possibility of underspecified representations.

References

Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-Functional Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1988. "On si constructions and the theory of Arb". Linguistic Inquiry. 19.521-581.
Everett, Daniel L. 2000. "Why There Are no Clitics On the Storage, Insertion, and Form of F-Features". in: Peter Coopmans, Martin Everaert & Jane Grimshaw (eds.). Lexical Specification and Insertion. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 91-114.
Grimshaw, Jane. 1982. "On the lexical representation of Romance reflexive clitics." In: J. Bresnan (ed.) The mental representation of grammatical relations. Cam-bridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, pp. 87-148.
Grimshaw, Jane. 1997. "The best clitic: constraint conflict in morphosyntax." In: Liliane Haegeman (ed.) Elements of grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 169-196.
Monachesi, Paola. 1999. A lexical approach to Italian cliticization. Stanford, California: CSLI Publications.