Clitics in Wolof: syntax all the way up

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This paper explores the properties and placement of clitics in the Niger-Congo language Wolof. I affirm the proposal initially put forth by Dunigan (1994), that Wolof clitics move to the highest head in the extended projection of the verb, contra subsequent analyses which argue for the need for a prosodic component to Wolof clitic placement (Zribi-Hertz & Diagne 2002, Russell 2006). The main argument for the absence of a post-syntactic readjustment of clitic position comes from the behavior of the subject clitic, which is initial in the extended projection of the verb if there is no higher functional head that could attract it, but patterns with other clitics when such a head is present. I show that this is straightforwardly accounted for if the subject clitic can undergo EPP-triggered A-movement to the specifier of the highest head in the extended projection of the verb, placing it outside the c-command domain of that head. I demonstrate that previous accounts misanalyze a crucial piece of data related to subject pronouns; once the correct empirical observations are adopted, a purely syntactic analysis straightforwardly derives all clitic placement patterns. I formalize clitic movement as triggered by an EDGE-feature on the highest head in the extended projection of the verb, so that the goal feature on the clitics becomes activated in the c-command domain of the EDGE-feature, and stays inactive otherwise. Finally, clitic climbing reveals another property of Wolof clitics: their need to be located in the inflectional layer of the clause. Wolof clitics confirm an important property of Wackernagel-like clitics: that their movement is primarily syntactic, as argued by Ouhalla (1989) for Berber, Franks (1998/2010) for Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Legate (2008) for Warlpiri, even if it in some languages involves a prosodic component. Clitic Movement of this type looks similar to other types of movement to the edges of domains. To the extent that such movements are syntactically motivated, so then is the movement of Wolof-type clitics.