Clitics and functional categories: Comments on Agr-based approaches to cliticization in Old Spanish

Abstract

Some of the recent analyses of the placement of pronominal clitics in Old Spanish adopt an Agr-based minimalist approach to the problem. One such analysis, Agr-raising analysis (Mallen 1999), accounts for some instances of clitic placement in Old Spanish. However, there exhist constructions that seem to constitute counterexamples to the proposed checking mechanism. This paper discusses problematic aspects of the Agr-based syntactic licensing conditions for the cliticization problem in Old Spanish.