2.2.4. Summing up

To conclude this section, we point out the following. The morphemes that enter into the build-up of the Romanian verbal complex are syntactic clitics, rather than affixes. We defined clitics as terminal elements and distinguished between two types in Romanian:

- includes short adverbs and the perfective marker fi ‘be’.

- represents a terminal elements of the Xmin type which adjoins to functional verbal

heads, forming a zero-level category (i.e., Y°) that projects as a specifier-less category.

- includes pronominal clitics, auxiliaries, the negative morpheme nu ‘not’, and the infinitival and subjunctive mood markers (a and , respectively);

- represent terminal elements of the X° type and project maximal categories without specifiers.

The essence of clitic-hood is its licensing domain and its head status. Unlike affixes, which are base-generated onto the lexical verb, clitics are functional morphemes (i.e., IP-related). Moreover, while affixes are inserted as part of and together with their lexical host, clitics are heads inserted into the derivation independently of their lexical host. However, in contrast to words, clitics need a well-defined syntactic host and cannot move; their flexibility of position (see, for example, pronominal clitics in Romance) is always the result of other elements moving around them.

Insofar as the Romanian IP is concerned, we suggested it consists of a series of heads, all of which lack specifiers. Furthermore, the Romanian IP was argued to enable head-merge/collapse (with relevant consequences for feature checking and movement) and Long Head Movement, due to the absence of IP internal specifiers and clitic status of IP-related morphemes. We assumed a strong [+ V] feature on the Romanian T° head which always triggers lexical verb raising to the Inflectional domain, but only to the closest Infl head. Such an approach unifies, in a sense, the spirit of several previous proposals made for IP in this language: the split-IP hypothesis (Cornilescu 1997, Motapanyane 1995, Ștefănescu 1997), the non-distinct nature of AgrP and TenseP in Romanian (Dobrovie-Sorin 1994a), the non-unitary target of lexical verb raising (Motapanyane 1995, Ștefănescu 1997). However, it maintains a distinct flavour by favouring head-merge over vacuous movement, by assuming symmetric equidistance of heads, and by viewing clitics as heads projecting XPs.