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In Spanish the preverbal forms allow a multi-verb construction to
follow, in which (by some analyses at least) the "true" verb
corresponding to the pronominal clitic is separated from that clitic.
E.g. me decían haber visto [me they.said to.have seen] "they said they
had seen me". This sort of thing probably is a factor in the intuitive
judgment of at least some that the proclitical version is less tightly
bound to the verb than the enclitical one. On the other hand one could
argue that since the enclitic does not affect stress (and therefore
often requires the writing of an orthographic accent: e.g. <i>olvidando</i>
+ <i>lo</i> --> <i>olvidándolo</i>) it is not behaving like a
typical suffix and could (or should) be written separately.<br>
<br>
It's not purely a matter of orthography with no (non-orthographic)
linguistic considerations behind it: on the other hand it is indeed
largely a matter of orthographic convention.<br>
<br>
--David Tuggy<br>
<br>
Marco Baroni wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid439D42DA.70101@sslmit.unibo.it" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Hi there.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">There are really two issues here:
(1) Why the possessive marker precedes the possessed noun in standard
Italian, but follows it in Neapolitan.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
Italian dialects are varieties that derive from Latin, not Italian, so they
can be as different from Italian as the other Romance languages (although
of course dialects as they are spoken today will show many traces of
centuries of contact with a prestige variety). So, it is not surprising to
find even deep syntactic differences between Italian and a dialect (in this
case, Neapolitan seems closer to the default Latin construction, although I
think that this post-nominal possessive constructions were mantained just
with mamma (mother) and a few other terms of this sort, where probabbly
the N+poss
construction is very frequent). [But, closer to (my) home, many Northern
Italian dialects are not pro-drop, and they have verb-negation
constructions, so syntactically they look more like French than Italian...]
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">(2) Why the possessive is written "solid" with the possessed noun in
Neapolitan.
I don't know anything about (1). But as for (2), it's not clear to me
at least what the significance of writing the possessive marker without
a space is. This could just be a matter of orthographic tradition (of
course, I'm not sure that Neapolitan _has_ an orthographic tradition).
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
Neapolitan does have a literary tradition, although I have no idea about
how standardized its orthography is. However, this is a feature it shares
with standard Italian, where we
write proclitics with a space (lo fa: he does it) and enclitics without
(fallo: do it). Personally, I always suspected that this is related to the
famous "prefix-suffix asymmetry", for which pre-root materials, in many
languages, tend to merge with the root less than post-root materials,
perhaps because of lexical access constraints. In Italian and, I suspect,
Neapolitan, there is also a lot more boundary phonology happening between
words and enclitics/suffixes than between proclitics/prefixes and roots.
So, while it is a matter of orthographic tradition, I think that this
orthographic tradition is reflecting some deeper linguistic trend, in this
case.
Regards,
Marco
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</pre>
</blockquote>
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