Clitic Placement in Early Grammars: the Case of Cypriot Greek

In this paper, we investigate the acquisition of clitic placement in Cypriot Greek, on the basis of spontaneous speech and elicited production data, both cross-sectional and longitudinal. Data analysis reveals ceiling percentages of misplaced clitics in proclisis contexts for a subset of children below the age of 3, while enclisis contexts are adult-like from the onset. On the basis of this result, we propose that enclisis is the default pattern for clitic placement in Cypriot Greek and we attribute the overgeneralization of enclisis to the overgeneralization of verb movement (Petinou & Terzi 2002).