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Clitic Placement after Syntax: Evidence from Wolof Person and Locative Markers

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Abstract

This paper is an empirical contributionto the typology of functional nominals(pronouns), and to the theory of clitics. Its primary goal is to present an adequate descriptive analysis of the attached person and locative markers of Wolof, a language whose ‘special clitics’ partly pattern like those of Berber, described by Dell and Elmedlaoui (1989), Ouhalla (1989), and Boukhris (1998). Our study leads us to discard an all-syntactic account of the special position of clitics, of the sort developed by Ouhalla and Boukhris for Berber, and by Njie (1982) and Dunigan (1994) for Wolof, and to adopt an approach crucially separating the syntactic and morphophonological properties of clitics, along the lines set by various scholars working on the syntax-phonology interface.

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Zribi-Hertz, A., Diagne, L. Clitic Placement after Syntax: Evidence from Wolof Person and Locative Markers. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20, 823–884 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020494714861

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