Second position revisited: a uniformly syntactic account of split predicates

The thesis addresses the placement of `second position' clitics in a linear order in preposed predicates in Croatian. In particular, I propose a uniformly syntactic analysis of the `second position' effect in Croatian by analyzing the discontinuous AP predicates in root clauses and neutral discourse from Diesing\&Zec (2017). The motivation for the syntactic analysis of second position becomes inevitable with the evidence of novel data with the raising to subject construction presented in Chapter 3. The raising data with split and unsplit AP predicates forces the analysis where AP predicates are `split' earlier than post-Spell-Out (namely, in the syntactic component). This new evidence shows that AP predicates are not motivated by prosodically conditioned lowering of a clitic into the predicate in a post-syntactic component of the grammar, as most recently assumed by Diesing\&Zec (2017). In Chapter 3, I motivate the mechanisms that are involved in predicate `splitting': complex predicate formation and predicate inversion (Moro 1997). The former evacuates the head of the AP to spec BeP. This creates a remnant AP constituent which undergoes predicate inversion to spec TP (a la Moro (1997)). Second, the raising data force us to conclude that AP predicates prepose to spec TP position, in the same way as canonical DP subjects do. This result is consistent with the analysis of predicate initial copular constructions in (Moro 1997). In Chapter 2, I show that the `second position effect', more generally, involves movement of the closest XP to a specifier of a root node in a root clause, around a clitic complex. The clitics in the citic complex are a sequence of separate head constituents situated in a region of the clause higher than spec TP from where they do not move further. The analysis of the clitic complex in a stable region of a clause has been proposed in Romance (Kayne 1991), and the analysis where movement via attract closest occurs to the `1st position' in the root clause has been inspired by the root phenomenon in continental Germanic