The grammatical status of Romance pronominal clitics has long been the object of intense debate. Are they syntactically-independent arguments or are they affixal agreement markers? This dissertation addresses this question with respect to Québec Colloquial French (QCF). It treats the morphophonological and morphosyntactic dimensions as two independent dimensions, thus allowing either for affixes to have argument status and prohibiting them from cooccurring with an overt, lexical argument, or for non-affixal elements to behave like agreement markers and not count as syntactic arguments. The analysis reveals that all the clitics of QCF are affixes at the morphological level, since they demonstrate numerous patterns which are too idiosyncratic to be handled by syntactic rules. Only subject clitics, however, function as agreement markers, since they occur in all...

this paper. First and foremost should be mentioned Peter Sells and Masayo Iida upon whose work this paper builds. I have also received advice and comments (relating to data or linguistic analyses, though generally the latter) from Lynn Cherny, Hye-won Choi, Mary Dalrymple, Yookyung Kim, Yoshiko Matsumoto, Shigeru Miyagawa, Bill Poser, Yoshiko Sheard and Shuichi Yatabe. My email address is manning@csli.stanford.edu.

this paper has been presented as a poster at the VIII th International Congress for the study of Child Language, July 1999, San Sebastian. I would like to thank Susan Powers, Thomas Roeper, Jiirgen Weissenbom, William Snyder, Ken Wexler, Paul Law, Arhonto Terzi and Susann Fischer as well as the audience of the VIII th IASCL for helpful comments and suggestions. This study is part of my Dissertation research in the Graduate Program 'Okonomie und Komplexitt in der Sprache' of the University of Potsdam and the Humboldt University at Berlin, which is supported by the DFG. Finally, I wish to thank ZAS - in particular, Dagmar Bittner - for providing a visiting fellowship, which enabled me to elaborate crucial parts of this paper

Abstract not found

Deponent verbs are specified as an idiosyncratic group that requires exceptional syntactic