The syntax of Basque allocutive clitics

Abstract

A key piece of evidence in favor of recent proposals that speech act roles are encoded in the syntax comes from languages with “allocutivity” –agreement with non-thematic addressees. This paper analyzes the syntax of allocutive morphemes in the best studied allocutive language, Basque. It is shown that properties of these morphemes, including morpheme order and the way allocutive morphemes condition exponence of neighboring heads can be modeled using standard assumptions about cliticization, head-adjunction and case in Basque. The analysis lends support to a central idea in recent literature on the syntax of speech act roles, namely that addressees are encoded by a nominal element introduced in the left periphery. This paper proposes that, in Basque, this nominal element is overt, with a distribution that obeys principles similar to those for thematic addressees.