The contrast between pronoun position in European Portuguese and Castilian Spanish: An application of Functional Grammar

Cast in Functional Grammar (FG), this chapter considers the syntactic placement of pronominal clitics in European Portuguese (EP), contrasting these with comparable phenomena in Castilian Spanish (CS). It emerges that EP constituent order results from the interplay of (at least) a single, minimally specified structural pattern, a principle of increasing syntactic weight, and the independently required principles of restrictive apposition and adverbial insertion. The specific difference between EP and CS reduces to the insight that EP allows placement of the verb in clause-initial position, whereas this is excluded in CS; verb position determines the occurrence of proclisis and enclisis, which we analyse as syntactic rather than morphological in EP. The chapter illustrates the applicability of FG to the comparison of languages.