Abstract: Abstract The focus of this chapter is on second position clitics in Serbian, which can follow either a first word (FirstWord) or a first phrase (FirstPhrase) clitic host. Our central concern is the role of prosody in FirstWord clitic placement. We conducted an experimental study in which we investigated the selection of FirstWord or FirstPhrase clitic hosts in both production and processing. We found a striking asymmetry between predicate and argument-initial sentences, with FirstWord placement preferred in the former and FristPhrase placement in the latter case. We also found that, in predicate-initial sentences, any initial prosodic word could serve as a FirstWord clitic host, whereas in argument-initial sentences, the choice was restricted to only those prosodic words that syntactically correspond to a pre-head modifier. We conclude that, while prosodic information is necessary for the selection of FirstWord clitic hosts, it needs to be enriched with syntactic information of non-local nature.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-01-19
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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