Previous Proposals

Abstract

The previous chapters have presented in full detail the complexity of the variation in the placement of weak object pronouns. Although it was shown that this complexity can be reduced if we take into account the various parameters that affect pronoun position, the overall pattern is still intricate enough that there is no obvious generalization to account for it. In this chapter, I present several accounts proposed by other researchers who have dealt with this phenomenon. In the first section, proposals specifically about Later Medieval Greek pronoun placement are considered, but it is demonstrated that all of them are flawed in one way or another. In the second section, I evaluate the analyses that have been suggested for similar phenomena in other languages, most notably Old Spanish. These too however, are not able to handle the LMG facts. Since all of the above proposals attempt to explain weak object pronoun placement by making appeals to phrase structure, the third and final section of the chapter examines the viability of two other approaches, one that is prosodically based, and a morphological one. Unfortunately, these do not fare any better than the syntactic accounts. In the conclusion, I identify the two key characteristics of the variation in LMG that make it so challenging to explain.