Clitics, Pronouns and Movement

Book excerpt: The introduction to this volume by Anders Holmberg provides a reflection on movement in the light of recent developments in Minimalist theory. His discussion of the theories of category versus feature movement in terms of displacement and copying, provides the background for 12 papers dealing with clitics, pronouns and movement in variety of language families. Articles on Romance include papers on the genitive clitic in Andean Spanish, proclitic groups and word order in Caribbean Spanish, overt pronouns and empty categories in Brazilian Portuguese, the clitic en in Catalan, and clitic doubling in Romanian. Papers on Germanic discuss movement of verbal complements in Dutch and German, analyses of English finite auxiliaries in syntax and phonology, and complementizers in dialects of German in a reiterative syntax analysis. Other articles deal with object shift in Serbo-Croatian, operator-bound clitics in Niuean, a serial verb analysis of the ba construction in Mandarin Chinese, and experiencer verbs in Japanese.