Pronominal cliticization in European Portuguese: a postlexical operation

Pronominal clitics in the Romance languages are known to display affix-like behaviour. This fact has led to proposals, such as Zwicky (1987) and Halpern (1995) for European Portuguese (EP), that pronominal clitics behave like lexical affixes because they are (inflectional) affixes. In this paper we argue against such an analysis of EP pronominal clitics. First, we present a bulk of phenomena -including distributional facts, the (non-)application of phonological rules, and the (non)application of morphophonological rules- that clearly differentiate EP pronominal clitics from inflectional affixes, and argue for the postlexical combination of verbs and clitics. We then survey the arguments put forward in favour of the lexical attachment of pronominal clitics in EP, and show that these are not compelling arguments for the lexical hypothesis. We conclude that pronominal cliticization must be treated as a postlexical operation in EP