Romance clitic pronouns in lexical paradigms

Some morphologists claim that Romance clitic pronouns, rather than being constituents, are encoded in morphological paradigms, together with inflectional affixes. I argue against this position, claiming that these clitics, just like their non-clitic counterparts, are organized in lexical, not in morphological paradigms. Among the features that define these paradigms, I especially address those which are responsible for the realization of the verb’s arguments. I argue that they are case and animacy features, and that a mechanism is needed to map these features onto the grammatical functions needed for an LFG-type syntax.The proposal also comprises clitic clusters. Roughly speaking, my analysis is that they have a discrete, complex structure at the feature level, but are fused units in constituency.