Clitics meet micro-comparative syntax; quirky structures in Northern Greek dialects

In this talk, I introduce and analyze dialectal data from Grevena, a Northern Greek dialect, and investigate its cliticization patterns comparatively to those of other varieties and Romance languages. Focusing on object clitics in this dialect, there are two main explananda that I account for. Firstly, clitics (as weak pronominal elements) are placed higher than a main verb in tensed environment but lower than that in non-finite environments, exhibiting proclisis and enclisis through an interaction with Tense. Secondly, the indirect object first person singular clitic can intervene between the verbal root and its inflectional suffix in the imperative, exhibiting mesoclisis. This talk argues for the following; (a) proclisis and enclisis to the main verb is a product of Movement and Agreement, but the constituency is such that syntax/phonology mismatches occur in both directions (b) mesoclisis has an underlyingly enclitic syntactic output where the post-syntactic rule of Generalized Reduplication (Harris and Halle, 2005; Arregi and Nevins, 2018) has been applied. The formal fragment of this work is couched in Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993, et seq.), building formal tools that may be extended to other varieties, too.