Mesoclisis and enclisis of object clitics in some Northern Italian dialects: for a syntactic treatment of morphology

In some north-eastern Piedmontese dialects, the OCls, unlike their usual distribution in the Romance varieties, are found in enclisis not only on the imperative and the infinitive but also on declarative forms. Moreover, these dialects show mesoclisis in the verb and enclisis on locative or modal adverbial elements associated with the verb. These data lead us to rethink the analysis of enclisis and mesoclisis in terms of the ability of the inflected verb to realize Phasal domains. We assume that morphology is part of syntactic computation and that morphemic elements, endowed with interpretable content, are introduced by the operation of Merge. In keeping with this framework, enclisis seems to imply that OCls are merged to the verb as part of its morphological complex