Microvariation in agreement inflection: Subject clitics vs inflection

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the presence and shape of subject clitics and verbal endings in a sample of 187 Italo-Romance dialects. It is found that in the majority of languages subject clitics outnumber distinctive inflectional endings. The absence of underspecified systems militates in favour of diachronic and synchronic explanations claiming that the presence of subject clitics is related to the richness of inflection. At the same time, however, the predominance of overspecified systems indicates that further factors are at play in shaping inventories of subject clitics. The second result is that, from a geolinguistic perspective, close dialects exhibit more similarities in the inflectional system than in clitic systems. This brings further support to the claim that inventories of subject clitics do not reflect the array of inflectional endings, whereas some further factors are probably involved in the emergence of subject clitics. Such factors might be either feature geometries/filters, as proposed in the previous literature, or third factors in Chomsky’s sense, i.e. factors that are related to computational efficiency and/or processing costs.