Although there seems to be a renaissance in the study of clitics, little attention has been devoted to the historical study of the process of pronominal cliticisation. Classical handbooks of the history of the English language tell little of the process (Mossé 1952, Mustanoja 1960, Fisiak 1965, Visser 1978, Blake 1992). Previously, attention was rather reverted to an earlier period, namely Old English, with primary means of investigation relying mainly on syntactic conditioning, following Kayne's (1985) assumptions (Koopman 1994, 1997; Pintzuk 1996) or the focus was shifted altogether to a synchronic description of contemporary English processes of cliticisation (Zwicky and Pullum 1983; Zwicky 1985, Klavans 1995, Dixon 2007). Also contemporary in nature are accounts in those references where (English) clitics are viewed from a cross-linguistic typological perspective (Kemenade – Vincent 1987, Beukema – Dikken 2000, Gerlach – Grijzenhout 2000, Dixon – Aikhenvald 2002, Anderson 2005).
This paper is a part of a larger PhD project and aims at a depicting a few aspects of conventions and conditioning factors governing the process of pronominal cliticisation typical of clitics in the Middle English. Focus will be placed on personal pronouns. Text analysis will constitute the basis for this investigation and it shall be carried out on two linguistic planes. Research based on the phonological aspects aims at utilising the poetic dictum of the times, incorporating the metre and the remaining alliteration, as the major source of information regarding the placement of stress (Minkova 2003). Also, it seemed crucial to incorporate syntactic criteria, such as word order or syntactic scope, in order to complement the findings based on the phonological factors. Finally, scribal conventions are viewed as additional hints on possible constraints regarding the process.
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