Challenges in the linguistic description of

Romanian weak pronouns

UiT Norges Arktiske Universitet
Ciprian-Virgil Gerstenberger
ciprian.gerstenberger@uit.no
January 27, 2015

1 Introduction
Despite undertakings such as (Yngve and Wasik, 2004) that try to put linguistics on a
par with established hard sciences (e.g., biology, physics, and chemistry), linguistics is
regarded as a soft science due to the difference in the degree of accuracy and objectivity,
employment of controlled experiments, the production of testable prediction models and
the use of mathematically exact ones.
In the last decades, linguistics experienced a rapid change in research methods
from predominantly theoretical to more and more empirical fact that is caused by the
extremely fast development of digital data compilation and sharing. Yet, should a linguist
working with large amounts of language data ignore the descriptions made by theoretical
linguists? Or vice versa, should a linguist working theoretically ignore insights won by
empiric work?
Any theoretical linguist had to work with some language data, any empicially working linguist has to have at least a simple theoretical framework in order to interpret and
evaluate the empiric against it. Yet, factors such as the amount or the provenance of language data play a crucial part. Using Romanian weak pronouns as the phenomena under
scrutiny, this essay tries to shed light on some general problems of language description.
Besides strong personal pronouns, pronouns that can receive contrastive stress, Romanian possesses a set of weak pronouns, pronouns that can not be used with contrastive
stress. These kind of pronouns are not specific to Romanian, as many languages feature

them. In tradition literature, they are referred to as atonal pronouns, weak pronouns,
or clitic pronouns. Yet, many other non-pronominal items are labeled clitics, too,
(e.g., subjunctions, auxiliaries, adverbs), and for the sake of trying to be neutral, I will
refer to them as Romanian weak pronouns. For the same reason, I will try to use the
more general term sandhi, the Sanskrit for joining, when other researchers would use the
notion of cliticization, cliticisation, or clitisation.
First, I will show basic problems of the traditional concept the clitic-host pair. Then,
I will point to the fact that trying to define the notion of clitic is almost as hard as
to define whether an embryo is already a human being or not. What are the relevant
features for cliticness? is the crucial question.
Further, I will review different approaches to the Romanian weak pronouns and will
point to the sore spots of their argumentation. As will be demonstrated, different types
of ambiguities are the main source for their tenuous description and modeling. Subsequently, I will provide the solution for the ambiguity issues: disambiguate wherever this
is needed. Then, I will reflect on my own approach and on the results as well as on the
manner of communication between the different researchers that dealt with Romanian
weak pronouns. I will conclude this essay with a possible interpretation of Karl Poppers
falsifiability demand.

2 Clitic-host pair
Generally, clitics are items that can belong to any grammatical category with syntactic
characteristics of a word, yet are phonologically bound to another word. This means they
share both properties with words and with affixes. Conceptually, they can either lean
from the left as proclitic or from the right as enclitic to a host. In the French
sentence Je taime. (eng. I love you.), the accusative pronoun t leans from the left
to its host, the verb aime: a clear case of proclitic. In the Latin expression Senatus
Populusque Romanus (eng. The Senate and Roman people) the conjunction que leans
from the right to its host Populus: a clear case of enclitic.
This neat description of clitics get blurred by a series of facts. As shown in Fig. 1,
clitics occur often as a sequence, which can be a mix of different categories (subjunctions,
negation, auxiliaries, adverbs). The first question is whether all clitics in such a clitic
sequence lean the same way to the host or not. Lets have a closer look. In Romanian,
both the auxiliary am in Ex. 1 and the weak pronoun le in Ex. 2 are regarded as clitics to
the verbal host. What is then the state in such a simple clitic sequence as in Ex. 3? Both
2

Figure 1: A. Chereche, A Prosodic Analysis of Romanian Pronominal Clitics, 2014, p. 2, Ex.(1)

weak pronouns, mi and le, are syllabic and non-stressed (even non-stressable). Does the
whole clitic sequence form a clitic-host pair with the main verb or each weak pronoun
individually? The picture gets even more complicated if we take into account Ex. 4,
where the non-syllabic form of the weak pronoun leans directly on the auxiliary, which
provides the syllabicity of the syllable /leam/. Which is here the host, the auxiliary or
the verb?
(1) Am
vzut. [Am vzut.]
have_1.sg seen
I have seen.
(2) Le
vd.
[Le vd.]
them_3.pl.acc see_1.sg.pres
I see them.
(3) Mi
le
dai.
[Mi le dai.]
me_1.sg.dat them_3.pl.acc give_2.sg.pres
You give them to me.
(4) Leam
vzut. [Le-am vzut.]
them_3.pl.acc have_1sg seen
I have seen them.
Since the sequence of mono- or non-syllabic items that behave in some respects alike
but not in all is a mix of different categories, a further question arises: which items really
do belong to it and which not? The (non-stressed) subjunction s can be monosyllabic
(see Ex. 5-7) and additionally, it can be the syllabic host for the non-syllabic weak
pronoun form -mi, as in Ex. 6, on a par with the auxiliary am in Ex. 4. Yet, in specific
3

contexts such as in Ex. 8, it surfaces as non-syllabic form. Does the subjunction s belong
to the clitic sequence or not?
(5) Vreau s mi dai
cartea.
want-1sg that to me give-2sg book-def
I want you to give me the book.

[Vreau s mi dai cartea.]

(6) Vreau s -mi dai

cartea.
want-1sg that to me give-2sg book-def
I want you to give me the book.

[Vreau s-mi dai cartea.]

(7) Vreau s aduci cartea.

want-1sg that bring-2sg book-def
I want you to bring the book.

[Vreau s aduci cartea.]

(8) Vreau saduci cartea.

want-1sg that bring-2sg book-def
I want you to bring the book.

[Vreau s-aduci cartea.]

There is no general agreement on the status of the verbal complex items as clitics.
Some linguists claim that these items should be classified as affixes, some other claim that
these should be classified as affixes only post-verbally. Again, other researchers claim that
the items can be clitics pre-verbally, yet, thery are always clitics when following the main
verb, to mention only a couple a opinions. How is it possible that there is such a wide
range of disagreement among linguists when it comes to label such language items
as belonging to a category or another?
Generally, we categorize things based on their properties, hence, we label something as
being a specific entity based on its properties, properties that, in turn, we have to be able
to recognize. It is then clear that we can not speak about an entity, something belonging to
the realm of ontology, without refering to its recognizable properties, someting belonging
to the realm of epistemology.
That researchers disagree upon some category assignment in a specific domain is not
something extaordinary neither something specific to linguistics, or, lets say, soft sciences.
A famous example is assigning the category of planet to the celestial body Pluto. In 2006,
the International Astronomical Union (IAU) established the three criteria to be met by a
celestial body in our solar system to be classified as a planet. There, there is one criterion
Pluto doesnt meet in order to be labeled planet.1
1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet

The crucial difference between linguistics and, say, astronomy is in the degree of
agreement upon the interpretation of properties, upon deciding which properties are
relevant for assigning labels to specific items. What is then relevance? Relevance is made
up by all neccessary and sufficient conditions in order to define a specific category. Is
it at al possible to give a intesional definition of clitics at all? What about the notion of
word, one of the most central entities in linguistics? We have to keep in mind that there
is no clear-cut intesional definition of word that is unanimously accepted in the research
community.

3 To be or not to be a clitic or an affix or an

As described in the previous section, the concept of clitic-host pair is not quite compatible
with that of clitic sequence, and one question related with the concept of sequence is
whether all items belonging to it have the same status. Besides something labeled clitic
doubling (see Ex. 17-27), Romanian features syllabic vs. non-syllabic weak pronoun
surface forms that depend on the specific context of their occurence. This is perhaps
the reason why the term mesoclitic is not that often encountered in the literature.
However, in the linguistic description of European Portuguese, this term seems to be
more fashionable. In the European Portuguese clause conquistar-se- (eng. it will
be conquered) the pronoun se is labeled as clitic while the present form of the verb
to have, namely , that together with the infinitive form of the main verb form the
synthetic future tense, is regarded as an affix. Yet, a similar picture can be found in
Romanian, especially in the nowaday not that often used inverse forms of declarative and
interrogative sentences: cuceri-se-va (eng. it will be conquered).
To repeat, the concept of mesoclitic as a clitic leaning in the middle of a lexem is
not compatible with the original concept of clitic. Since it is a phenomenon described
on phonological level cliticization have to occur with a strong host, a phonological item
that is stressed. Hence, if both the Romanian and the Portuguese se are clitics then both
have to be enclitics. The only problem is to justify why an affix does not attach to its
verb immediately. The traditional concept of a lexem with stem and affixes is not valid
any longer because in these cases stem and affixes are interspersed with clitics.
This is not the end of the story. In languages such as Udi, Pashto, or Degema, some
items labeled endoclitics are described as splitting the root into two pieces (e.g., Harris,
2002), hence their domain of attachment is a part of the root. Not only that the concepts
of mesoclitic and endoclitic blur even more the clear clitic-host image, they even
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challenge the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis, too. This hypothesis represents the basic
assumption that complex words can not be changed by syntactic rules.
Why is so hard to agree upon a set of properties that clitics should have? According
to the clitic model put forward by (Klavans, 1995), some clitics can be regarded as
transition stages of a grammaticalization process: lexical item clitic affix. It
is therefore understandable that clitics share properties both with lexical items and with
affixes. Although by far not with the same ethical and moral burden, the clitic dilemma is
somehow comparable with the dilemma of deciding whether an embryo is already a human
being or not. Here too, the borderline between different stages is not that perspicuous.
What are the relevant features that discriminate clitics from affixes?

4 Relevant features
As with clitics in general, Romanian weak pronouns and other items labeled as clitics
have been and still are a highly debated the topic of research. As (Spencer and
Lus, 2013) points out, the checklist of rules to distinguish clitics from affixes in English
provided by (Zwicky and Pullum, 1983) has not proved too useful for applying it to
different languages. Lets turn now to the relevant features that determined different
researchers to label Romanian weak pronouns as clitics or as affixes.
Compared with other clitic pronominal systems, the Romanian weak pronoun system convey both Latin and Slavic features, which is due to the Balkan Sprachbund
(cf. Calude, 2001). Whether within Lexical Functional Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase
Structure Grammar, Distributed Morphology, Optimality Theory, or other formalisms,
the discussion whether they are clitics or affixes still has not come to an end. Among
morphophonological models, (Barbu, 1999) and (Monachesi, 2005) claim that the Romanian weak pronouns are affixes, while (Popescu, 2000) and (Gerlach, 2002) label them as
clitics.
Working within Optimality Theory, (Chereche, 2014) delivers a prosodic analysis of
Romanian weak pronouns asserting that pronominals and auxiliaries are free prosodic
words in all environments, other than when they combine with each other: two pronominals combine as internal clitics and auxiliaries combine with pronominals as affixal clitics
(Chereche, 2014[p. 60]). The syntactic account in (Svescu Ciucivara, 2009) argues that
Romanian weak pronoun clusters behave differently from the point of view of internal
order in pre-verbal vs. post-verbal position, allegedly refuting the universality of the
Person Case Constraint. This account assumes that Romanian weak pronouns are the
6

same type clitics both pre- and post-verbally. Like (Svescu Ciucivara, 2009), two other
syntactic account on the same topic, maintain that there is a difference between pre- and
post-verbal Romanian weak pronouns, yet the difference is not in the linearization behavior but in the type of clitic. The model in (Dobrovie-Sorin, 1999) introduces a distinction
between syntactic and phonological clitics in order to establish a common property to
all clitic elements of different types (noun, adverb, verb). All Romanian weak pronouns
are syntactic clitics but not all are phonological clitics: in pre-verbal position the weak
pronouns may or may not be phonological clitics, while in post-verbal position they all
show obligatory phonological cliticization. In a similar vein, the description offered by
(Klein, 2007) makes a clear distinction between pre-verbal and post-verbal Romanian
weak pronouns as it is stated that we must distinguish between preverbal weak pronouns which encliticise, preverbal weak pronouns which procliticise, and preverbal weak
pronouns which neither encliticise nor procliticise (postverbal weak pronouns are always
enclitic) (Klein, 2007[p. 13]).
Models labeling Romanian weak pronouns as affixes do not consider crucial differences between whatever is the normal behavior of an affix and the specificities of weak
pronouns. Lets look closer at some arguments pro affix status. In (Monachesi, 2000), it
is claimed that morphophonological idiosyncrasies are specific for affixes and that
such phenomena can be encountered also with the weak pronouns. The optional vowel
deletion for weak pronouns ending with an such as m in front of a verb beginning with
an unstressed a or o is compared with weak pronouns ending with an e such as ne, le,
and te. The idiosyncrasy is that in the form se the final e deletes optionally in the same
context as .
The presentation of this argument is symptomatic for many other articles that focus
on promoting a specific formal model thereby ignoring relevant data sets. First, the
alleged idiosyncrasy is an optional form to a non-deleted yet non-syllabic variant (see Ex.
9-16). Moreover, the form s- is obligatory for the non-optional sandhi such in s-a auzit
(eng. has been hearable). I personally wouldnt say s-aude but only se-aude. The
form s-aude might be encountered in older texts or as a regionalism, perhaps in Moldova.
Ergo: there is absolutely no idiosyncrasy there, obviously, the lack of knowledge about
the whole range of phenomena led (Monachesi, 2000) to draw a wrong conclusion.
Another fact that (Monachesi, 2000) does not mention in this context is that all
e-ending weak pronoun forms do enter optional sandhi in the mentioned contexts in a
regular way. All weak pronoun forms in Ex. 9-12 are syllabic while those in Ex. 13-16 are
non-syllabic, which again puts the form s-aude (eng. is hearable/hears himself) on
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(9)

El m aude.
He me hears
He hears me.

(10) El te aude.
He you hears
He hears you.
(11) El ne aude.
He us hears
He hears us.

[El m aude.]

(13) El m- aude.
He me hears
He hears me.

[El m-aude.]

[El te aude.]

(14) El te- aude.

He you hears
He hears you.

[El te-aude.]

(15) El ne- aude.

He us hears
He hears us.

[El ne-aude.]

[El ne aude.]

(12) El se
aude.
He himself hears
He hears himself.

[El se aude.]

(16) El seaude.
He himself hears
He hears himself.

[El se-aude.]

a par with se-aude (eng. is hearable/hears himself) and te-aude (eng. hears you).
It is worth mentioning that optional sandhi with different variants is not necessarily
something uncommon: pe acolo, pe-acolo, and p-acolo (eng. around there) can all be
found in spoken Romanian, and again, pe is syllabic while pe- and p- are non-syllabic, as
they are linked with a hyphen with the following word. Similar phenomena can be found
in many language, for instance, in German, which features variants such as andererseits,
andrerseits, and anderseits for the eng. on the other hand.
Even (Monachesi, 2000)s most convincing evidence in favor of the affixal status
of Romanian weak pronouns, the clitic doubling, loses its convincibility when we take
into account further relevant language data. The clitic doubling, the fact that they [i.e.,
Romanian weak pronouns] can co-occur with full complements behaving in those cases
virtually as agreement markers (Monachesi, 2000[p. 8]) is shown in Ex. 17, which is the
same as (Monachesi, 2000[p. 8, Ex. 24a.]). In a further example, (Monachesi, 2000) shows
that it is possible to have only the weak pronoun, hence without the full complement.
Yet, (Monachesi, 2000) does not tell the whole, rather complicated, story of even
banning the weak pronoun in specific contexts. The occurrence of weak pronoun and full
complement is controlled by a set of constraints over animacy vs. non-animacy, salience
vs. non-salience, given vs. new, topicalized (i.e., occurring on the first position in the
clause) vs. non-topicalized, as is exemplified in Ex. 18-25. Due to the aforementioned
constraints, a co-occurrence of weak pronouns (aka agreement affixes) and full complement is non-grammatical in Ex. 19, 21, and 23, while in Ex. 25 it is required. In contrast,

the co-occurrence is optional if the complement is salient, as shown in Ex. 26 and 27. To
my best knowledge, such kind of behavior is not typic for agreement affixes. A further
totally atypic behavior for affixes is to occur both before and after the verb as a function
of verb mood: one and the same affix does not occur, say, as prefix in indicative and as
suffix in imperative. The Latin affix ad fixum means to/in a fixed position.
(17) Maria i
d preedintelui un buchet.
Maria CL.DAT gives president-the a bouquet
Maria gives the president a bouquet.
(18) Ciprian citete o carte.
Ciprian reads a book
Ciprian reads a book.

[Ciprian citete o carte.]

(19) *Ciprian o
citete o carte.
Ciprian PRON-CL-SG-FEM reads a book
Ciprian reads a book.
(20) O carte citete Ciprian.
a book reads Ciprian

[*Ciprian o citete o carte.]

[O carte citete Ciprian.]

Ciprian reads a book (not a newspaper).

(21) *O carte o
citete Ciprian.
a book PRON-CL-SG-FEM reads Ciprian

[*O carte o citete Ciprian.]

Ciprian reads a book (not a newspaper).

(22) Ciprian citete cartea.
Ciprian reads the book
Ciprian reads the book.

[Ciprian citete cartea.]

(23) *Ciprian o
citete cartea.
Ciprian PRON-CL-SG-FEM reads the book
Ciprian reads the book.

[*Ciprian o citete cartea.]

(24) Cartea o
citete Ciprian.
the book PRON-CL-SG-FEM reads Ciprian
Ciprian reads the book.

[Cartea o citete Ciprian.]

(25) *Cartea citete Ciprian.

the book reads Ciprian
Ciprian reads the book.
(26) El m vede pe mine.
he me-CL sees PE me
He sees me.

[*Cartea citete Ciprian.]

[El m vede pe mine.]

(27) El m vede.
he me-CL sees
He sees me.

[El m vede.]

A similar case of leaving out or ignoring relevant data that not fit a specific model
or formalism is (Chereche, 2014)s description. (Chereche, 2014) makes the correct, but
partly too general and partly too specific, observation that [h]igh vowels are not allowed
at the end of a Prosodic Word (Chereche, 2014[p. 55]) and declare Romanian weak
pronouns and their combinations as prosodic words. Yet, this constraint applies to weak
form of the copula verb and their combinations with weak pronouns, too (see Ex. 28).
The form -s is the weak form of the copula snt 2 (eng. are), whose vowel is a high vowel.
(28) Crile
mi
-s
dragi.
books-DEF to me are-CL dear
I love books.

[Crile mi-s dragi.]

One interpersonally testable feature of Romanian weak pronouns is syllabicity

vs. non-syllabicity, yet, in my humble opinion, even this issue is not handled properly.
The main reason for this state is ambiguity on different levels, as explained below.
As reproduced in Fig. 2, (Chereche, 2014) labels -prothetic forms such as i in (2)
as long while those in (3) as short: note that the form i- in (3)a. is non-syllabic
orthographically marked with a hyphen while the form i in (3)b. is syllabic there
is no hyphen linking the pronominal form to the adjacent item. A similar classification
uses also (Popescu, 2000[p. 775]) when partitioning the Romanian weak pronouns into
full and reduced forms: the -prothetic forms as well as the form in (3)b. are full forms
while the form in (3)a. is an instance of a reduced form in (Popescu, 2000). The same
partition as (Popescu, 2000) is offered also by (Guu-Romalo, 2008[p. 203]) by labeling
(Popescu, 2000)s full forms as clitice libere (eng. free clitics) and Popescu, 2000)s
reduced forms as clitice conjuncte (eng. bound clitics). The English version of
(Guu-Romalo, 2008), (Dindelegan, 2013), keeps the same partition of Romanian weak
pronouns into free and bound clitics (Dindelegan, 2013[p. 388]).
As for the syntactic models offered by (Dobrovie-Sorin, 1999) and (Klein, 2007), they
dont pay too much attention to the real phonologic value of a graphic string: whatever is written with a hyphen and is not syllabic before the verb is a clitic for (Klein,
2007) and a phonologic clitic for (Dobrovie-Sorin, 1999), and whatever is post-verbal is
obligatorily clitic for (Klein, 2007) and obligatorily phonologic clitic for (Dobrovie-Sorin,
2

sunt in the orthography since 1993

10

Figure 2: A. Chereche, A Prosodic Analysis of Romanian Pronominal Clitics, 2014, p. 52

1999). What is the reason for these differences in the description of such a relatively
trivial phenomenon?

5 Ambiguities in description
The answer to the question about the discrepancies in the description of Romanian weak
pronouns lies in various types of ambiguities. What is interesting is that, in striving
to achieve more clarity, some linguistic descriptions add even more ambiguous elements
to the phenomena described. How is this possible?
Lets try to make out the different types of ambiguities that can occur or even have
occurred in description of Romanian weak pronouns. The communication of research
between (not only) linguists is done mostly in written form (e.g., articles in journals,
books). It is no mystery that there is no perfect mapping between speech and writing,
therefore ambiguities between the two representations occur in some languages more,
in other less frequently. The more ambiguities there are in a language, hence, also in
the language data presented in articles, the more additional information is needed for
disambiguation, especially in communication with non-native researchers.
Homograph issues
As a matter of fact, Romanian conveys a good deal of ambiguities both among Romanian weak pronouns and with other parts of speech. For instance, the string o can be
3p.sg.fem.acc weak pronoun as in o vd (eng. I see her/it), indefinite article as in o
carte (eng. a book), or future particle in colloquial language as in o s citesc (eng. I

11

Figure 3: M. Iliescu, Pentru o sistematizare a predrii pronumelui personal neaccentuat romnesc,

Limba Romn 24, 1975

will read). Further, i can be 3p.sg.masc.dat, 3p.sg.fem.dat, 3p.pl.masc.acc weak pronoun forms, or the weak form of the copula verb a fi (eng. to be). Again, i can be
3p.refl.dat weak pronoun form as in el i le cumpr (eng. he buys them for himself)
or the conjunction i (eng. and) as in ea i el (eng. she and he). Moreover, s can be
1p.sg.pres or 3p.pl.pres weak form of the copula to be as in crile mi-s dragi (eng. I
love books), or the non-syllabic form of the reflexive weak pronouns in accusative as in
el s-a splat (eng. he has washed himself), or the non-syllabic form of the subjunction
s (eng. that) as in trebuie s-anun tirea (eng. I have to announce the news).
Phoneme-grapheme issues
Since Romanian weak pronouns surface in different forms one of the biggest challenge is
the ambiguity between the phoneme and the grapheme string. For instance, the 1p.sg.dat
weak pronoun form is mi but the written string does not have always the same pronunciation (see Fig. 3). Although the orthography might give some clues for disambiguation
it is not always reliable, as is explicated in the next paragraphs. The solution, a quite
cumbersome one, is to disambiguate any and every written representation by adding the
phonetic counterpart, as offered by (Iliescu, 1975) in Fig. 3.
Hyphen issues
In Romanian, all sandhi phenomena that involves desyllabification are marked by a hyphen, yet, not all instances of hyphen are sandhi marking. As in other languages, the

12

hyphen serves several purposes such as (1) marking compounds prietenia romno-bulgar
(eng. the Romanian-Bulgarian friendship), (2) marking sandhi l-am vzut (eng. I
have seen him), (3) marking any item in the verbal complex in post-verbal position
Cumpr-i-le! (eng. Buy them (to yourself)!) as opposed to the pre-verbal position
as in i le cumperi. (eng. You buy them (to yourself).). Both i and le are syllabic
both in pre-verbal and in post-verbal position, hence the role of the both hyphens in
Cumpr-i-le! is solely to mark post-verbality.
This tiny ambiguity in the use of hyphen obviously led (Dobrovie-Sorin, 1999) and
(Klein, 2007) to the wrong conclusion that whatever weak pronoun comes after the verb
has to be a phonological clitic in (Dobrovie-Sorin, 1999)s description and clitic at all
in (Klein, 2007)s description. An accurate examination shows that this is by no means
true because both models mix up syllabic and non-syllabic surface forms. In both Ex. 29
and 30 te is syllabic despite the fact that the former is written without hyphen while the
later is written with hyphen. In Ex. 31, however, te is non-syllabic, therefore the sandhi
between te and acas is marked with a further hyphen, as the standard orthography
requires. To repeat, (Dobrovie-Sorin, 1999) means by phonological clitic a reduced, i.e.,
non-syllabic form, and (Klein, 2007) means the same by clitic. Now, how comes that
an already reduced form can further reduce by entering a sandhi with the subsequent
item? Or to put it in (Dobrovie-Sorin, 1999)s terms: if mi in Ex. 6 is phonological clitic
to the subjunction s and at the same time syntactic clitic to the main verb dai for the
pre-verbal configuration and if te in Ex. 31 is syntactic clitic and obligatory phonological
clitic to the main verb du for the post-verbal configuration then how is it possible for te
to be phonological clitic also to the adverb acas? A three-fold clitic-host relationship?
(29) Te
duci acas.
yourself carry home
You go home.

[Te duci acas.]

(30) Du -te
acas!
carry yourself home
Go home!

[Du-te acas!]

(31) Du -teacas!
carry yourself home
Go home!

[Du-te-acas!]

I hope that these elaborations have been clear enough to illustrate the problems with
the function overloading of the hyphen in Romanian orthography.

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 -Prothesis issues
At the beginning of the previous problem description called Hyphen issues, I stated
that in Romanian all sandhi phenomena that involves desyllabification are marked by a
hyphen. This is true only if we ignore the real purpose of in the -prothetic forms such
as mi, i, i, i. Referring to those forms, I keep using -prothetic because exactly this
is the purpose of the vowel /W/: to be syllabic prothesis to weak pronoun and weak
copula forms ending with a high vowel in specific configurations, namely as the only item
in the sequence.
Despite the fact that the phenomenon of -prothesis has been observed and described
as early as 1976 by (Lombard, 1976), there are very few references to it and even less is
this observation taken into account in the analysis of Romanian weak pronouns. This is
the reason of the questionable classifications into long vs. short by Chereche, 2014, full
vs. reduced by (Popescu, 2000), or free vs. bound weak pronouns by (Guu-Romalo,
2008) and (Dindelegan, 2013) described above.
Again, the standard orthography is ambiguous once more: the inconsistency lies in
using the hyphen as desyllabification marker in all contexts involving Romanian weak
pronouns but in contexts where the syllabic nucleus is provided by the -prothesis. Irrespective of their individual syllabic support, both mi forms Ex. 32 and 33 have exactly
the same phonological shape, namely /mj /: mi /Wmj / and s-mi /s@mj /. This shape
sameness between the two orthographically different forms has been already pointed to
by (Iliescu, 1975), again, a further article that is hardly taken into account in formal
descriptions of Romanian weak pronouns.
(32) Vreau s mi
dai
cartea. [Vreau s mi dai cartea.]
want-1sg that to me give-2sg book-def
I want you to give me the book.
(33) Vreau s -mi
dai
cartea. [Vreau s-mi dai cartea.]
want-1sg that to me give-2sg book-def
I want you to give me the book.
That the -prothesis can not be analyzed as a proper part of the weak pronouns is
evident also from the fact that exactly the same vowel /W/ plays the same prothetic
role in the weak forms of the copula a fi (eng. to be), as exemplified in Ex. 34 and 35.
And again, this observation has been already made by (Lombard, 1976).
(34) Ei mi
-s
dragi.
they to me are-CL dear

[Ei mi-s dragi.]

14

I like them.
(35) Ei s
acas.
they are-CL at home
They are at home.

[Ei s acas.]

Language description issues

At the beginning of this section, I dared to make the bold claim that, in striving to
achieve more clarity, some linguistic descriptions add even more ambiguous elements to
the phenomena described. Let me now show some facts that substantiate this claim.
The task of this research is not to find and assess the quality of language data examples
throughout the research articles on Romanian or even only on Romanian weak pronouns,
yet I am bound to point that a thorough evaluation of examples found in the literature
as has been done for Norwegian by (Engh, 2006) is badly needed. In extensive use
of clitic forms, some copy&paste error or typo can slip in, such is the case with -mi
in (Soare, 2005[p. 49, Table 1]), assuming that the authors have a good command of
Romanian. With non-native speakers it is harder to assess whether, e.g., Pleca voi. in
(Legendre, 2000[p. 13, Ex. 13Rb.]) is a typo or lack of knowledge. In (Legendre, 1999[p.
9, Ex. 16Rb.]), the same author has exactly the same example with the correct spelling,
namely Pleca-voi..
Using the Leipzig Glossing Rules (LGR) cliticization by the equals sign = and
segmentable morphemes separated by a hyphen (Klein, 2007[p. 17]) , (Klein, 2007) seems
to avoid to use the hyphen as orthographic element of the object language, although not
explicitly stated. Yet, this leads to ambiguities such as Mercedes-ul (eng. the Mercedes)
in (Klein, 2007[p. 96, Ex. 44b.]), which can be as well an orthographic element, since in
specific contexts the definite article is spelled with a hyphen. Moreover, although in most
contexts the equals sign as cliticization marker seems to be used in a similar way as the
hyphen in the standard orthography, in some contexts the standard orthography would
have been a more precise description. Fig. 4 depicts (Klein, 2007[p. 63, Ex. 14]) with the
addition of the correct orthographic string as the top line for comparison reasons. While
the first equals sign in the example i=l=a misleads the reader in suggesting that there
is some sandhi between i and l, the use of standard orthography is unambiguous in this
respect for pre-verbal contexts as it spells i l-a.
It is almost always a guessing exercise when it comes to the use of Leipzig Glossing Rules in Romanian examples: is the hyphen part of the meta-language, hence of
the glossing rules, or of the object language, i.e., of the Romanian orthography? In

15

Figure 4: (Klein, 2007[p. 63, Ex.14]) enriched with the correct orthographic string as the top line

Figure 5: A. Zwicky, On clitics, 1977, p. 20

(Chereche, 2014[p. 52, Ex. 3a.]) reproduced in Fig. 2 , the hyphen is probably part
of the orthography.
One has to be wary of questionable language data even in frequently quoted articles
such as (Zwicky, 1977). The only two Romanian examples reproduced here in Fig. 5
are both spelled the wrong way, even in the orthography from 1928 or 1976. The correct
spelling is biatul i va da-o and biatul i-o va da, respectively.
I conclude these issues with two further observations. First, since (Zwicky, 1977)
with the Romanian examples quotes Hetzron (1976 ms.), which, in turn, quotes Olsen
(1928:80), such errors propagates in other articles and can lead to distorted descriptions
of language phenomena. Second, the use of hyphen as element of the meta-language in the
Leipzig Glossing Rules interferes with its use as orthographic element in object languages,
e.g., in Romanian. Since the hyphen in Romanian is a frequently used character with
already overloaded functionality this fact adds more ambiguity to the already extant one.
Is there a way out from this situation?

6 Solutions
As in philosophy, putting the appropriate questions is more valuable than trying to give
answers, so in problem solving, making out the real problems can lead to clear solutions.
Lets start to formulate the solution of the very last issue, the ambiguities added by the
use of common elements both in the meta-language and in the object language.
16

Since the Leipzig Glossing Rules are meant to work for all languages a possible solution
of avoiding ambiguities between the two types of language is to collect all elements from
all languages with writing systems and exclude them from the meta-language. This would
be a tedious and, perhaps, not that viable solution because the set of common elements
could be large and, in the meta-language, one has to provide a replacement for each
element belonging to both.
The simplest solution has already been used in Fig. 4: the correct orthographic string
of the example in (Klein, 2007[p. 63, Ex.14]) has been added as the top line. That
means, in order to avoid ambiguities in languages that have a standard orthography, each
example has to contain an additional line: the language data in the correct spelling. In
the spelling line no meta-language elements should be used, while in the analysis and
glossing lines, all possibly ambiguous elements from the object language are banned.
With other words, each set of ambiguous elements between the two type of languages
be interpreted as belonging only to its specific line. Hyphens in the orthography string
should be always hyphenobjectlanguage while hyphens in the analysis and glossing lines
should be exclusively hyphenmetalanguage . If needed, the time stamp of the orthography
used has to be provided in case of orthography changes over time.
For my own examples in this article, although I have not used the Leipzig Glossing
Rules I added the correct orthography in the string in square brackets on the right of
each example. Even if sometimes it seems redundant the LaTeX example style used has
to add whitespace characters in order to align the items in the first and second line the
analysis and the glossing lines , a fact that distorts the correct orthography.
Lets turn now to the remaining ambiguities in the description of Romanian weak pronouns. Again, crystallizing the individual problems offers at the same time the solution:
Disambiguate each type of ambiguity!
To get a correct description of Romanian weak pronouns in terms of syllabicity, there
are three problems to pay attention for. First, since it has been shown that the prothesis is not pronoun proper part all -prothetic forms be classified as non-syllabic.
Second, in pre-verbal position the occurrence of a hyphen is unequivocal, it marks a
sandhi, i.e., desyllabification. Hence, the only problem here is to disambiguate between
syllabic and non-syllabic forms with the same graphemic representation such as syllabic
mi in mi-l /mil/ or mi-i /mitsj / vs. non-syllabic mi in s-mi /s@mj /, mi-o /mjo/, or
mi-a /mja/. Third, in addition to the disambiguation between syllabic and non-syllabic
forms, the challenge in post-verbal position is to disambiguate between the hyphen used
as post-verbal marker, the hyphen used as sandhi marker, and the hyphen used as both
17

syllabic

non-syllabic

i-l dai, i le dai, d-i-le

nu-i dai, nu i dai, s-i dai,

i dai, i-ai dat, d-i

le dai, d-i-le, d-le acum

le-ai dat, d-le-acum

te duci, du-te acas

te-ai dus, du-te-ai, du-te-acasa

se apuc, fac-se lumin, mi se face ru

se-apuc, s-apuc,
s-a apucat, fac-s-ar lumin

Figure 6: Classifying Romanian weak pronouns i, le, te, and se into syllabic vs. non-syllabic
post-verbal and sandhi marker.
Table 1 shows some instances of disambiguation on all levels by means of the following
marking:
an oval box denotes a non-syllabic part of a sandhi (e.g.,


l
)

consequently, syllabicity is represented by the lack an oval box around an item

, mi le faci, f
mi
le)
(e.g., i
a thick hyphen denotes solely a sandhi (e.g., i


l
)

a half-thin/half-thick hyphen denotes both sandhi and post-verbality


(e.g., cumpr
l
)
a thin hyphen denotes solely post-verbality (e.g., f

mi

le)

The result of such cumbrous disambiguation work with the Romanian weak pronouns
is a clean classification of the items under scrutiny into syllabic vs. non-syllabic, as is
done exemplarily in Fig. 6 for some instances of i, le, te, and se.

7 Reflections
Let me step back and see what I have done. I evaluated different models and descriptions
for Romanian weak pronouns, I pointed to the weaknesses of the models and descriptions,
I found out that the reasons for the errors are different types of ambiguities, and finally,
I disambiguated all these types of ambiguities. And what is the result of all this work?

18

No. Orthography
1.

Disambiguation


Translation
Youve bought the book.

2.

i-ai cumprat cartea. i  ai cumprat cartea.


i-l cumperi.
i
l
cumperi.

3.

i-o cumperi.

o cumperi.

You buy it.

4.

S-i cumperi cartea!

i cumperi cartea!

Buy the book!

5.

Te duci acas.

Te duci acas.

You go home.

6.

Du-te acas!

Du

Go home!

7.

Du-te-acas!

Du

8.

Cumpr-l!

Cumpr

9.

Cumpr-i-l!

Cumpr

10.

Cumpr-i cartea!

Cumpr

11.

Cumpr-i-o!

Cumpr

12.

M lai n pace.

M lai n pace.

13.

Las-m n pace!

Las

m n pace!

Let me in peace!

14.

Las-m-n pace!

Las

Let me in peace!

15.

O lai n pace.

O lai n pace.

16.

Las-o n pace!

17.

Las-o-n pace!


Las


Las

18.

Mi le faci acum.

Mi le faci acum.

You do them for me now.

19.

F-mi-le acum!

mi

Do them for me now!

20.

F-mi-le-acum!

mi

21.

Ceva se aude.

Ceva se aude.

22.

Ceva se-aude.

23.

Ceva s-aude.


Ceva se


Ceva s

24.

Tu te auzi.

Tu te auzi.

25.

Tu te-auzi.


Tu te

26.

Du-te ncolo!

Du

te ncolo!

Go away!

27.

Du-te-ncolo!

Du

te

Go away!

28.

Du-te n cas!

Du

te n cas!

Go inside!

29.

Du-te-n cas!

Du

te

Go inside!

30.

Te mbei.

Te mbei.

You get drunk.

31.

Te-mbei.

Te

You get drunk.

i 

 
 

te acas!

te

acas!

You buy it.

Go home!


l
!


i
l!
  

Buy it!
Buy it!

i cartea!

Buy the book!

Buy it!


 

 

o!

You let me in peace.


n
pace!

You let her in peace.

o n pace!

Let her in peace!

Let her in peace!


n
pace!

le acum!
 
le 

acum!

Do them for me now!

Something can be heard.

aude.
aude.

Something can be heard.

Something can be heard.
You can be heard.

auzi

n
colo!

n
cas!


m
bei.

You can be heard.

Table 1: Hyphen and syllabicity disambiguation for pre- and post-verbal Romanian weak pronouns
19

Well, the climax is a cheap partition of weak pronouns into syllabic and non-syllabic,
something an eighth-grader in a Romanian school should have a good command of. Was
it worth it? Absolutely!
The first insight is that descriptions of Romanian weak pronouns that do not try to
model, hence, formalize them have a better coverage and are better suited to capture
properties that can be intersubjectively tested. This is the case with descriptions in
(Iliescu, 1975) and (Bredemeier, 1976), as opposed to those in (Dobrovie-Sorin, 1999),
(Monachesi, 2000),(Klein, 2007), and (Svescu Ciucivara, 2009), (Popescu, 2003), or
(Chereche, 2014).
The second insight is that descriptions on the morpho-syntactic and prosodic level,
i.e., on the low-level, are much better suited than those trying to model the phenomena
into syntactic frameworks. This is the case with (Chereche, 2014), (Popescu, 2003), or
(Gerlach, 2002), as opposed to (Dobrovie-Sorin, 1999), (Monachesi, 2000), (Klein, 2007),
and (Svescu Ciucivara, 2009). On the other hand, low-level models have a narrow,
sometimes perhaps too narrow, view on the input string. While syntactic approaches
operate at least on clause-level, (Popescu, 2003)s Optimality Theory model tries hard
to cope with optional sandhi (cf. Ex. 32 vs. Ex. 33), and (Chereche, 2014)s model
again, an Optimality Theory model ignores optional sandhi phenomena altogether by
deeming them dependent on many uncontrollable factors.
The third insight is that there is little scientific communication between the highlevel and low-level models, if at all. By scientific communication I mean comparing
approaches on a specific level of granularity or even trying to integrate the own approach
in the other. Refining the old label clitics into syntactic clitics vs. phonological
clitics as in (Dobrovie-Sorin, 1999), or into internal clitics vs. affixal clitics as
in (Chereche, 2014) does not lead to a better understanding of the phenomena nor to a
better understanding of each others model.
Further, (Klein, 2007)s categorization into strong pronouns, weak pronouns, and
clitics is not totally congruent to (Cardinaletti and Starke, 1999)s partition into strong
pronouns, weak pronouns, and clitics. And although is seems that Romanian is
perfectly suited for such an tripartite analysis as in (Cardinaletti and Starke, 1999), the
article does not take into account the Romanian pronominal system at all. This might
have to do with their method, as it is stated that [w]hat is to be explained by the
model are (genuine) generalisations. In such research, it is usual that some facts resist
generalisation, and some generalisation resist integration into the model. (Cardinaletti
and Starke, 1999[p. 44]).
20

Figure 7: U. Klein, Encoding of argument structure in Romanian and SiSwati, PhD thesis, University
of London, 2007: p. 77

Generalization is the goal of any science, just collecting and counting entities would
render a scientific domain into an accounts department. Yet, generalization implies a
process starting with specific instances, hence it is a bottom-up process. If you start
to generalize from a far to higher level you can never accommodate for the instances
you ignored, these are the facts that resist generalisation, in (Cardinaletti and Starke,
1999)s terms, the black swans of modus tollens3 .
Facts that resist your generalization are in fact counterexamples, facts that discard
your generalization, and in stating that, I am not alone with this opinion. An introductory book in critical thinking expresses the same ideas as follows: When we generalize,
we make a general claim about something based on specific evidence about that something. [] In fact, those that are universal statements (claims about all or none, always
or never) are often overgeneralizations (an error []); all it takes to disprove such an
overgeneralization is one counterexample. (Tittle, 2011[p. 287]).
Generalization is not only a theoretical issue, a good generalization enables a good
modeling of phenomena, hence a workable, operational, implementable model. At the beginning of this section I stated that the result of my hard disambiguation labor is a cheap
partition of weak pronouns into syllabic and non-syllabic, something an eighth-grader in
a Romanian school should know. Yet, it is obvious that the analysis of -prothetic forms
as non-syllabic is an abstraction that has not been employed by any other descriptions,
models, or formalizations. Ignoring this abstraction would lead to, at least, implausible
frameworks such as (Klein, 2007)s, where all possible -prothetic forms are modeled as
input items as such (see Fig. 7). This is tantamount to a model of the human world in
which most babies are born with a prothesis, say, a wooden leg.
The generalization over -prothetic and non- -prothetic is on a very low level, on the
level of syllable. Can we work with weak pronouns or clitics without giving a definition
for them? Well, there are two basic types of definitions: intensional and extensional.
Some researchers came up to the conclusion that the term clitic is best thought of as
3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability#Inductive_categorical_inference

21

an umbrella term for a variety of properties which may or may not coincide. Although it
may be useful in individual languages to set up a special sub-category of clitic to capture
various distributional or formal generalizations, there is no obvious sense in which clitics
represent a uniform, universal category. (Spencer and Lus, 2012[p. 11])
The universe of whatever I refer to as Romanian weak pronouns is so small that
it is manageable even with an extensional definition, i.e., an exhaustive item listing.
(Chereche, 2014) refers to them as pronominals (as opposed to stressable pronouns)
without giving an intesional definition for them.
The main message of the present article is that it is more important to describe the
items under scrutiny carefully, i.e., with both their phonologic and their writing representation, and as surface-oriented as possible, i.e., with as little theory-laden elements
as possible than to try to give intensional definitions for clitics or Romanian weak
pronouns.
But we have to keep in mind that, as mentioned, science results are communicated
almost exclusively in written form. The written phonetic representation, e.g. the IPA
character set, is a more accurate mapping between phoneme and grapheme than the orthography of a language but it could create even more understandability problems among
researchers. The non-syllabic form of the Romanian weak pronoun mi in combination
with an auxiliary verb as its syllabic support as in mi-a, for instance, is represented in
(Iliescu, 1975) in a different way in Fig. 3 as in (Chereche, 2014) in Fig. 2.
And even if such a partition into syllabic vs. non-syllabic I arrived at is not unquestionable because of the category syllable (cf., for instance, (Blevins, 1996)) is not
unquestionable there is a far greater chance that more researchers would agree upon
the category syllable than upon categories such as (Dobrovie-Sorin, 1999)s syntactic
clitic or (Chereche, 2014)s internal clitic or affixal clitic.
Why is an agreement among researchers relevant? Speaking about natural sciences,
(Popper, 2009) states that [] perceptions and observations (more precisely, perception
and observation reports) are never taken seriously in science unless they are
objective, that is, intersubjectively testable (Popper, 2009[p. 131]).
Is objectivity, i.e., intersubjective testability, possible in linguistics? By stating that
it is usual that some facts resist generalisation, (Cardinaletti and Starke, 1999) deny a
priori any other researcher even the least chance to falsify their genuine generalisation.
The only thing worse than a presumed impossibility of falsifiable hypotheses in linguistics
is a hostile attitude towards a sensible research argumentation and communication.

22

8 Conclusions
A prima facie simple question of the type What is a clitic? entails fundamental philosophical problems of different kinds. Initially an ontological question What is the entity
? has necessarily to do with humans possibility of recognizing its features, hence
an epistemic problem What can I recognize? which, in turn, leads to the question
of subjectivity of perception Do we humans recognize the entities features the same
way? Yet, to test that we recognize the entities features the same way we have to
communicate our research results to each other.
The next question is whether we understand each others terms, each others data
descriptions, each others models the same way. Is this the case? It is hard to say.
We re-define old terms and invent new terms, we overload old terms with new meanings
and refine established terms by further sub-classifying them. I am not alone in stating
that: we often find that different experts working on different language groups will use
the same terms but with different meanings, or alternatively will use different terms to
describe essentially the same phenomenon. (Spencer and Lus, 2012[p. 6])
One can think that it is not possible to formulate falsifiable hypotheses in linguistics
because of the huge amount of assumptions or because of gradiency of linguistic categories.
One can interpret Poppers falsifiability of hypotheses as prescriptivism and Kuhns
paradigm shift as descriptivism (Tore Nesset, personal communication), yet I do not
share this view totally. In my humble opinion, Poppers falsifiability method is applicable
on how each individual corrects and adapts his world knowledge as a function of experience
accumulation. To exemplify this idea, let me tell you a joke:
A woman goes to Court in order to sue her son-in-law for defamation.
Woman: My son-in-law called me a hippopotamus.
Judge: When did that happen?
Woman: About 25 years ago?
Judge: Why have you waited so long with the complaint?
Woman: It was not before yesterday that I went to the zoo and saw one.
Since the woman thought a hippopotamus was some term of endearment she didnt have
a reason to sue her son-in-law for insulting her. The encounter with a hippopotamus at
the zoo was the falsification of her believes, the falsification of her hypothesis about the
meaning of the word hippopotamus.
Ergo, in our communication, be it in private or in research, we will never know whether
we understand each other the same way, we might only find out that in a specific point
23

our apprehensions were not congruent with each other. Or, to put it in Poppers terms:
we can not prove that our apprehensions are congruent with each other, we can only
falsify it. Call it solipsism if you want, I call it sound skeptical realism, anyway, we
will never know whether we understand these terms the same way.

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25