A Prosodic Analysis of Romanian Pronominal Clitics

Romanian pronominals have an extensive array of surface forms. Most previous literature calls this variation idiosyncratic and focuses on the morphosyntactic status of pronominals. I show that the phonology of pronominals is not only quite regular, but entirely predictable from the general phonology of Romanian. What is special about pronominals is not the constraints that apply to them, but how they are included into the prosodic hierarchy. The prosody of pronominals is partly due to general prosodic constraints, as outlined in Selkirk 1996, and partly due to lexical prespecifications, as in Zec's (2005) analysis of Serbian function words.