Kim Myung-Bae. 1999. An Optimality Theoretic Approach to Clitic Sequences in Italian. Studies in Modern Grammatical Theories 16, 161-180. Clitic Sequences in the Romance languages have been the subject of much work in generative linguistics with respect to their morphosyntactic properties and their phonological properties. The purpose of this paper is to examine the clitic sequences in Italian in the framework of Optimality Theory. I will examine how clitics combine and which clitics are chosen when their combination is prohibited. I will show that the conditions on the combination of clitics are best formulated as morphological constraints on the clitic sequences within an Optimality Theoretical Account. Thus, with the morphological constraint ranking I will explain both the order of clitics and the combinatory conditions on clitic sequences in Italian. I will show where the opaque clitics originate from in Italian. Then I will demonstrate how the phonological constraint ranking can explain the opaque clitics in Italian. Finally, I will suggest a tentative ranking for these types of constraints to select the optimal clitic sequence in just one evaluation process.

• 김명배 | Myung Bae Kim