BCMS Clitic Deprivation

Abstract

The present paper takes (yet) a(nother) look at one of the outstanding questions regarding the fate of enclitics within a BCMS clause, specifically, the one that explicitly asks: When both accusative and genitive pronominal enclitics are found in a clause, which one precedes the other? An answer is provided by relying on the data collected from seven different BCMS corpo­ra in an attempt to demonstrate that native BCMS speakers do not receive a sufficient amount of information from their elders’ verbal output in order for them to build the necessary linguistic competence so that they could conclusively order the pronomi­nal enclitics in question.