Clitic stress allomorphy in Sardinian

Sardinian displays stress shifts under cliticisation with imperative and gerund verb forms. Stress shift is related to the type and number of clitics associated to the host. Across the range of dialectal variation, three different stress shift patterns are attested. We will argue that Sardinian data supports the approach whereby stress shift variation cannot be regarded either as the result of purely prosodic rules or as the consequence of different syntactic feature-checking properties of the clause. The analysis here proposed accounts for stress placement as an allomorphy that is partly determined by phonological conditions.