Wackernagel's Revenge: Clitics, Morphology, and the Syntax of Second Position

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Abstract

Jakob Wackernagel is well known for the observation that clitic elements generally appeared in second position in their clause in early Indo-European languages. It is less well known that he also proposed this as the basis of the ‘Verb Second’ phenomenon. Finite Verbs in main clauses were apparently accentless in Indo-European, and he suggested that they were therefore treated as clitics and located in second position. This paper examines the possibility that there is indeed a fundamental relationship between Verb Second and clitic placement. I first argue that accounts of Verb Second do not extend correctly to the placement of clitics: if there is something common to these phenomena, it must involve generalizing clitic behavior to inflected Verbs, rather than vice versa. The range of clitics in the languages of the world is examined, and a set of parameters for the rules that locate them is formulated. I argue that these rules form a class with the rules of morphology that introduce affixes (and other phonological changes) into words. A unitary generalization is suggested: rules that provide formal markers of what Sapir called ‘relational’ or ‘derivational’ concepts realize these categories at a prominent anchor point (the beginning, the end, or the structural head of the material being marked). This class of rules also includes processes that transfer morphosyntactic features to an anchor position in the phrase, where they are reflected formally. I then suggest that existing accounts of why Verbs should move to their surface position in Verb Second languages lack independent justification; furthermore, they incorrectly miss the generalization that the Verb in such cases is always in second position. Icelandic constructions are discussed that suggest this position is not structurally uniform. Treating Verb Second as the result of a rule which says ‘realize the inflectional features of a clause immediately after its initial element’ unifies several cases and also expresses the connection between Verb Second and other second-position phenomena. I conclude that Wackernagel was right in proposing a unification of Verb Second and cliticization, though the generalization involved is not based on properties of word accent.

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