Clitics, Movement and Parameters

This course presents a general approach to head-movement/incorporation which deals with the objections raised by Chomsky (2001:38-9). The approach will be applied in detail to the phenomena of clitic-placement which are familiar from the Romance languages. Other familiar cases of incorporation (verb-movement, synthetic passives and causatives, noun-incorporation) will also be discussed. The framework for cliticisation/incorporation will be developed into a general approach to movement, taking into account “head pied-piping”, phrasal pied-piping and smuggling (in the sense of Collins (2005)). In turn, this leads to a consideration of the nature of parameters, in particular the difference between macro- and microparameters. In this connection I will develop Giannollo, Guardiano & Longobardi’s (2008) notion of “parameter schemata” and propose a theory of parametric networks.