Abstract

From a historical perspective, personal pronouns in Romance languages display a tendency to undergo changes in syntactic status in a particular order, namely; strong > weak > clitic. This article discusses the possible reasons behind the final step of this sequence of development, that is, that from a weak form to clitic status. It will be argued that the external trigger for this kind of diachronic change has to be a morphophonological one; if a weak pronoun is morphophonologically reduced over time, language learners may at some point come to analyze the pronoun as a clitic. A number of syntactic properties are expected to change as a consequence of the switch from weak form to clitic. This view gives support to Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) approach which argues for a principled link between the morphophonological make-up of pronouns and their syntactic status.

Furthermore, it is shown that the Italian dative pronoun loro ‘to them’ during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries underwent changes that corroborate the above hypothesis in an interesting way. Originally, loro was a weak pronoun but in some central Italian varieties, above all in the town of Siena, a reduced form lo’ emerged, which had clitic properties. Arguably, the phonological change preceded the syntactic one. For a period, both loro and lo’ are attested in rather free distribution. Later on, however, the Sienese grammar makes a clear distinction between them, analyzing lo’ as a dative clitic and loro as a strong pronoun.