Romance Clitics, Verb Movement, and PRO

Abstract Pronominal clitics in Romance may either precede or follow the verb they are associated with, depending on a number of factors, some of which I shall try to elucidate in this article. My analysis will take Romance clitics to invariably left-adjoin to a functional head. In cases where that functional head dominates the verb, this will straightforwardly yield the order clitic-verb. The order verb-clitic will, on the other hand, be claimed to result from the verb’s having moved leftward past the functional head to which the clitic has adjoined (rather than having the clitic right-adjoin to the verb). I shall focus on the question of clitic/verb order as it applies to embedded sentences, leaving for future work certain extra possibilities that appear in root sentences such as imperatives, and in certain other types of root sentences in languages such as Portuguese and Galician.