Clitics, 2P Languages and Word Order Typology

Guest lecture given at the University of Montreal (Université de Montréal, UdeM) 29 September, 2016. I render the notion and typological validity of the so called Second-Position Phenomena, i.e. principles of linearization sensitive to the distance from the clausal (or phrasal) left edge rather than to the type of the preceding syntactic category. In my talk, I discuss the interactions of clitic studies with word order typology and render the notions of clitic-external and clitic-internal ordering. Clitics clusterize in clausal-internal positions, not in clausal-edge positions. There exist at least 4 different types of word order systems with clustering clitics: W-systems, W+-systems, W*-systems and V-systems. Clitic-second languages (CL2 languages) and Verb-second languages (V2 languages) make up a class of 2P languages, cf. Roberts (2012) and Zimmerling (2015ab). Languages with endoclitics do not represent any shared syntactic system.