Clitic placement and the Anti-V2 effect in European Portuguese

Abstract Clitic placement with European Portuguese uninflected verbs is problematic for prosodic analyses. While ‘proclisis triggers’ give rise to obligatory proclisis with inflected verbs, they often lead to optional proclisis/enclisis with uninflected verbs ( Raposo & Uriagereka 2008 ), except for aspectual/quantificational adverbials with head-like behaviour ( Martins 2013a ). These patterns provide support for a syntactic ‘Anti-V2 requirement’, whereby clitics usually raise to adjoin to T and either: (a) an XP raises to/through spec FinP and the verb stays in Asp (resulting in proclisis); or (b) the verb raises through T to Fin (resulting in enclisis); but not both (building on Fernández-Rubiera 2009 , 2010 ). The special behaviour of uninflected infinitives can be explained by the possibility of clitics attaching to a lower verbal host and then moving with that host to T resulting in enclisis ( Raposo and Uriagereka 2008 ). Aspectual/quantificational heads block verb movement to T, ruling out enclisis via ‘low fusion’.