PARTICULAR FEATURES OF ISTRO-ROMANIAN PRONOMINAL CLITICS
PARTICULAR FEATURES OF ISTRO-ROMANIAN PRONOMINAL CLITICS

Summary/Abstract: Particular Features of Istro-Romanian Pronominal Clitics. Istro-Romanian is a ‘historical dialect’ of Romanian, a severely endangered linguistic variety, spoken in the Istrian peninsula (Croatia) as an endogenous language, and in USA and Canada as an exogenous language. Using the data extracted from the available corpora, the paper offers a descriptive account of the main features of pronominal clitics in Istro-Romanian, focusing on empirical phenomena such as interpolation, verb(-auxiliary)-clitic inversion, (absence of) clitic climbing, and the position of clitics with respect to other elements of the verbal cluster. Some parallels with Croatian are also drawn, and the importance of old Romanian/old Romance inheritance is also briefly assessed. Future research will concentrate on more closely determining what plays a more important role in the syntax of Istro-Romanian: preservation of archaic Romanian/ Romance features or language contact?

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