In this squib I present evidence against the syntactic accounts of the second-position effect in Serbo-Croatian (SC) (see, among others, . Most of these syntactic accounts of the second-position effect crucially assume that in overt syntax SC clitics are found in a cluster adjoined to each other and very high in the tree, allowing enough space for at most one element to precede them. Considering the behavior of SC clitics in VP-ellipsis, I show, however, that in overt syntax clitics need not be adjoined to each other and that each clitic may be located in a separate maximal projection. I further show that these new facts fit nicely into Bošković's (1995aBošković's ( ,b, 1997a account of the second-position effect.For helpful comments and discussion I wish to thank Howard Lasnik, Ž eljko Bošković, Steven Franks, Ljiljana Progovac, and two anonymous reviewers. I would like to thank Douglas Wharram for proofreading the manuscript, and Jason Boro for editorial assistance.
In this paper I point out a word order paradox in Serbo-Croatian and propose a solution to it. I show that there are data indicating that the subject must move overtly to the highest projection in the split IP, as well as data indicating that it can remain in SpecVP overtly. I argue that the key to resolving the paradox lies in a mechanism of pronunciation of lower copies motivated by PF considerations, similar to the one proposed in Franks (1998) and Bošković (2001, 2002). The mechanism entails that PF has a preference for pronunciation of the highest copy of elements moved in syntax, but that a lower copy can be pronounced in order to avoid a PF violation. I show that in Serbo-Croatian, a PF factor that can affect copy deletion is prosody. The proposed analysis captures extremely free word order of SC as well as discourse effects of scrambling.
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