KASHMIRI CLITICS - THE ROLE OF CASE AND CASE

Kashmiri pronominal clitics show a dual relationship - of form and ord er - with their coreferent. Both the form and the order pose interesti ng anomalies within current theories of clitics (Borer 1984; Jaeggli 1 986; Suner 1988). The goal of this paper is to explain these anomalies by taking into account some recent developments. In Kashmiri, forms o f clitics are linked with lexical cases in a biunique fashion. However , the E-forms are linked with ergative subjects as well as null-cased objects forming an exception. We argue that the lexical cases are a co mplex of positive and negative features. Under the feature system the ergative and the null-cased objects share identical feature complexes. The clitics and the coreferent NPs are now linked under a uniform con dition; namely, clitics match the lexical case features of their coref erent. We argue that Kashmiri clitics conform with the matching princi ple suggested in Suner (1988). Our analysis categorizes clitics with a greement. However, there is a problem. Clitic forms referring to the o bject, namely OBJECT CLITIC, escape their base position and move to th e right of the SUBJECT CLITIC. The object agreement shows no movement. We show that the distinction between object agreement and OBJECT CLIT IC can be properly explained if we adopt (i) multilayered inflection s tructure as in Pollock (1990); (ii) a distinct object agreement AGRo h ead as in Chomsky (1986); (iii) a head-to-head movement subsumed under relativized minimality as in Rizzi (1990); and (iv) clitics as adjunc tion heads as suggested in Roberts (1991).