The Incidence of Interpolation on the Word Order of Romance Languages*

The aim of this paper is to provide a syntactic account of interpolation structures in Romance. In the introduction you are presented with a general approach: definition, scope within the Indo-European languages and prosodic aspects of this linguistic phe-nomenon. In section 2, the distributive properties of clitic object pronouns with respect to the verb are examined in detail and they are exemplified with Old Spanish, Old Catalan, Modem Portuguese and Modem Galician data. This section is concluded with a hypothesis that regards interpolation as a kind of stylistic construction related to a syn-tactic projection that occurs between CP and IP (namely, FocusP). The existence of this maximal projection not only allows us to account for the syntactic distribution of cli-tic object pronouns in embedded sentences but also for the prosodic aspects involved. Section 3 is devoted to the analysis of periphrastic perfects and passives and the inter-vention of severa1 linguistic items between either haber or ser and the past participle, which have generally been considered interpolation structures (cf. Andrés-Suárez (1994)). In our opinion, these constructions must be given a different analysis and