The Movement Approach and the Base-Generation Approach: A Syntactic Analysis of Spanish Clitics

摘要

The syntax of clitics in Spanish has long been a topic of discussion amongst linguists. There are two traditionally held syntactic approaches for accounting for Spanish clitics: the movement approach and the base-generation approach. Both approaches succeed in capturing certain properties of clitics, but fail in capturing other properties. The literature suggests that 3rd person direct object clitics appear to function as determiners, whereas all other clitics function more as agreement markers. Taking this into account, I propose that the movement approach applies to 3rd person direct object clitics, and that all other clitics are base-generated. In this thesis, I provide a syntactic analysis of both approaches, the movement approach for 3rd person direct object clitics and the base-generation approach for all other clitics. Ultimately, it appears that both approaches can account for these clitics, although there are still a couple of minor problems with the movement approach, which pertain to the motivation for the clitic to move higher up in the syntax once having its agreement features checked, in order to arrive at its surface position.