Caractère Post-Lexical de la Cliticisation Française

Recent analyses of French cliticization (Borer 1981, Aoun 1981, Jaeggli 1981 ) treat object clitic pronouns as lexical affixes. In each case, the clitic is an argument of the verb, generated by a morphological rule which inserts the features PERSON, GENDER, NUMBER, on the verb. The clitic absorbs the Case assigned by the verb. This analysis fails to explain some important facts about French cliticization, in particular the fact that French clitics are not obligatorily arguments of the verb to which they attach. This problem is discussed in relation to Klavans' and Zwicky's analyses of cliticization, and it shown that French clitics seem to have post-lexical, rather than lexical, characteristics.