Spelling out enclitics and giving their tone a voice: Cyclic clitic incorporation in BCS and breaking the cycle

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines previously unnoticed facts about prosodic interactions between enclitics and their hosts in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). I show that there is a three-way split between BCS enclitics in this respect: (i) enclitics that always interact with the accent of their host; (ii) enclitics that interact with the accent of their host in some contexts, but not in others; (iii) and enclitics that never interact with the accent of their host. It is shown that this rather complex pattern can be accounted for in its entirety by a condition on prosodic incorporation of enclitics that holds at the point when syntactic structure is mapped to prosodic structure, which essentially requires the clitic and the host to be in the same spell-out domain in order for the clitic to incorporate into the prosodic word of its host, a prerequisite for the clitic to interact with the accent of its host. I also discuss certain idiosyncratic phonological properties of the auxiliary clitic je ‘be.3sg’ and the particle se ‘self’ that cause reordering of enclitics in PF. It is shown that this PF movement can have an effect on whether a clitic is spelled out in the same domain as its host, which in turn affects the prosodic interaction between the two. Based on the prosodic interaction of enclitics with the accent of their host, I argue for a phase-based approach to prosodic structure building (see also Dobashi 2003; Kahnemuyipour 2004, 2009;Kratzer and Selkirk 2007; Sato 2012; Sato and Dobashi 2016; among others).