Agreement and Cliticization in Italian: a Pregroup Analysis

This paper presents an analysis of features specification and agreement based on the parallel computations of a type calculus involving two pregroups grammars: the free pregroup of syntactic types that takes care of the syntactic calculations, and a second free pregroup computing feature operations. As recently argued by J. Lambek , working with two free pregroups in parallel has the advantage of treating featural information more carefully and independently from the type assignments; the calculus is therefore particularly appropriate for the analysis of agreement properties in Romance languages. In the paper we focus on the Italian language, introducing a type syntax of the verbal constructions in which clitic pronouns occur and offering an explanation of the interaction between agreement features and clitic pronouns.