Clitic placement in the Romanian verbal complex

The clitic system of Romanian includes negation, auxiliaries, pronouns and intensifiers which cluster around the verb in a fixed order. I argue that these clitics do not constitute a uniform class: pronominal clitics and intensifiers have affixal status and they combine with the host as result of lexical processes. On the other hand, auxiliaries and negation have word status and combine with the verb by means of syntactic processes. Under this view, the order of the clitics in the verbal complex doesn’t need to be stipulated as in previous generative analyses, but it is the expected one given the different status of the clitics and the appropriate division of labor between the lexicon and syntax.