'Si n'eren uns clítics de subjecte': Evidential Subject Clitics in Old Central Catalan

Abstract

[eng] The goal of this paper is to show that some sort of “subject clitics” (SCls), in a broad sense, indeed existed in a previous stage of Central Catalan (∼ 17th, 18th and 19th centuries), especially in traditional Catalan folk songs and romances (e. g.: Si n’eren tres tambors que en venen de la guerra ‘There were three drummers who are coming from the war’; Ja n’eren tres ninetes assentades en un banc ‘There were three little girls sitting on a bench’), and to provide a syntactic analysis for them. In particular, we are claiming that Central Catalan recycled the partitive clitic en/ne/n’ as an evidential SCl, usually preceded by a deictic adverb/particle (si ‘thus’, ja ‘already’). We propose that this clitic is the overt manifestation of an AgrNum head, specified by a deictic operator (overt or null) (Op), which maintains a D-linked or anaphoric relationship to a previous intervention in a discourse or to an implicit context, real or unreal, so the truth value of the statement can remain suspended. Then, Op moves higher in the CP domain, in order to bind its variable in the IP field and value an evidential Force[uDeictic] head, modifying the illocutionary force of the whole sentence and, therefore, presenting the source of information on the grounds of which the speaker justifies or supports a given speech act. Along its way to [Spec, ForceP], the deictic Op passes through several intermediate projections: ΣP/PolP, FocweakP and DeixisP—and, sometimes, also FoccontrastP, provided the Op possesses a [+contrast] feature. This paper also compares the similarities and differences between the Catalan evidential clitic en/ne/n’ and other SCls found in some Romance languages (Northern Italian dialects and Galician).