FEATURE STRUCTURE OF ROMANCE CLITICS

The combination of pronominal clitics in Romance often triggers the ap pearence of unexpected (opaque) form, which always coincide with cliti cs that exist independently in the language. In this article, which an alyzes opaque forms in Italian, Spanish, and, especially, Catalan, it is proposed that pronominal clitics constitute hierarchical structures of monovalent morphological features. This hierarchy reflects markedn ess relations. Most opaque forms are obtained through morphological ru les that delink or insert morphological features, thus rendering the t arget structure identical to the structure of another clitic. Morpholo gical rules take place within the Morphology Component, between S-stru cture and PF (cf. Halle 1990, 1991). Phonological information, not pre sent in the syntax, is introduced by spell-out rules very late in the Morphology Component and provides the input to PF. Clitic order is det ermined through mapping to a template. Some other opaque forms arise a t that point.