Elsewhere in Romance: Evidence from Clitic Clusters

International audienceThis article focuses on sequences of Romance clitics wherein a pro-nominal form is replaced by another clitic exponent, which is prima facie morphologically unmotivated. Bonet (1991) and Harris (1994) among others have argued that these synthetic clusters can be due to the insertion of an elsewhere clitic: a default, nonspecified item that is inserted as a last resort whenever the insertion of other clitics is ruled out. In this article, independent pieces of evidence gathered from Italian and Italian dialects are shown to support this hypothesis