Resumen de The status of clitics
This chapter centres on the internal properties, distribution and nature of Spanish clitics, a set of personal pronouns which share properties with both free words and affixes. Their behaviour indicates that clitics are sensitive to their own internal featural composition as well as to prosodic, syntactic and morphological features of their local environment. Personal pronouns in Spanish, like in many languages, have a strong and a weak form. The weak forms for object and reflexive pronouns are clitics, a form that shares properties with both free and bound morphemes. Clitics express distinctions for person, number, gender and case, although no single Spanish clitic marks a contrast in all these four dimensions. Availability of doubling also varies across varieties of Spanish, with interesting patterns of dialectal variation in terms of conditions on doubling possibilities. Spanish clitics are prosodically dependent on the verb.
