On cliticization in Croatian: Syntax of prosody?

Abstract

In the following paper it will be argued that the phonological approach to clitic placement in Serbian/Croatian, as proposed in Zec & Inkelas (1990), not only fails to explain the observed phenomena, but also fails at the level of descriptive adequacy.
Further arguments are presented against accounts which claim that clitic placement is syntactic and which utilize a post-syntactic operation of Prosodic Inversion (PI) in order to explain certain cases of apparent split of syntactic constituents (Halpern, 1992; Schütze, 1994).
It will be argued that an alternative analysis which assumes syntactic clitic placement as proposed in Wilder & Ćavar (1994) and Ćavar & Wilder (1994) appears to be descriptively adequate.