A multiple-agreement approach to auxiliary clitic drop in Croatian

Abstract

AbstractThe chapter introduces an under-studied phenomenon of auxiliary clitic drop by presenting the data from the first comprehensive experimental study in mixed-category clitic clusters in Croatian. The study comprised of four experiments pairing acceptability judgement and forced-choice tasks to examine auxiliary clitic drop when preceded by Canonical and Reverse PCC, and when preceded by nominal clitic varying in person and case value. The data capture person effects that show no interaction with categorical factors (double-object vs object-auxiliary clitic clusters), suggesting that auxiliary clitic drop should be considered as an instance of person-ordering constraint. The analysis focuses on an asymmetry in person-gender feature values and applies a multiple-agreement gender-relativized probe to account for the optionality of subject-agreeing auxiliary being dropped when preceded by 1st or 2nd person object accusative clitic.