OpenissuesTop_GrammarMatrixClitic

Open Issue: Clitics

Mentor: EmilyBender (ebender at u dot washington dot edu, http://faculty.washington.edu/ebender)

Co-mentors welcome!

Problem Statement

Many of the DELPH-IN languages (all the Romance languages, Modern Greek) display clitics (well, affixes that are usually called clitics). This seems like a fruitful area to explore from the perspective of computational typology. That is, can we develop a general analysis of these phenomena that works well in all of the languages concerned? Can we then abstract it out of the grammars and create a Matrix extension?

Further Extensions

Beyond Romance-style clitics (which are affixes on verbs, but also display interesting phenomena such as clitic climbing) there are also other kinds of clitics (e.g., second position clitics found in many Slavic languages, clitic-auxiliary clusters in Australian languages, Dutch clitic pronouns, etc). The phonological dependence of clitics combined with their syntactic indepedence often gives rise to interestin challenges in word order, which would seem a fruitful area of research to test the boundaries of our current systems which assumes a rather strict mapping between phenogrammatical structure and tectogrammatical structure.

Existing Literature

Miller, Philip H. and Ivan A. Sag. 1997. French Clitic Movement without Clitics or Movement. NLLT 15:573--639.

Monachesi, Paola. 1998. Decomposing Italian Clitics. In S. Balari and L. Dini, eds, Romance in HPSG 305--571. CSLI Publications.