Linguistic creativity with clitic left dislocated objects in Old Romanian
Linguistic creativity with clitic left dislocated objects in Old Romanian

Summary/Abstract: The following paper builds on diachronic data from the 16th century and 17th century Romanian language and argues that Romanian “clitic left dislocation” actually amounts to an umbrella term covering two different configurations: on older structure, already in place in the 16th century and obtained by way of merging the direct object directly in the left periphery of the sentence, and a more recent one, developing in the 17th century and grafted on the development of another mechanism arising at the time, i.e. “clitic doubling.” The latter configuration comes as a reflex of linguistic creativity and presupposes the leftward movement of a clitic doubled direct object.

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