An emergentist view on functional classes

In some Romance varieties, clitics have an unexpected, ‘non-canonical’ behaviour: they may be stressed, do not always climb to the auxiliary in compound tenses, may be separated from the verb by certain adverbs, etc. Some scholars have argued that the aforementioned non-canonical clitics are in fact weak elements in the technical sense of Cardinaletti & Starke 1999. The paper claims that any analysis advocating a rigid distinction between pronominal classes fails to account for the data. Empirically, many tests that are normally used to define pronominal classes do not hold cross-linguistically, while other diagnostics – in particular those regarding the morpho-phonological correlates of classes – are often contradictory. From a theoretical point of view, the paper argues that there is no clear evidence supporting the idea that pronominal classes are to be modelled in terms of inner syntactic constituency.