There are two sets of phenomena with respect to which the notion of "second position" seems to turn up: (a) the location of certain clitics; and (b) the positioning of the main verb in (certain constructions in) certain languages. Is there any sense in which these have anything to do with one another? The patron saint of seond position, Jakob Wackernagel, thought so, but his account has little cogency in a modern context. Despite this, is there any other sense in providing a unified account of the two?

I. On Clitics
The basic nature of clitics is considered, and arguments are offered for treating "special" clitics as the morphology of phrases, rather than as lexical items subject to special syntactic movement. A preliminary account of clitic placement in terms of operations similar to Word Formation Rules is offered, and problems with this are noted.

II. Clitic Positioning in OT
Treating (special) clitics as the phrasal equivalent of morphological affixation leads us to ask about the mechanisms by which such material is placed in the Phonological Forms of syntactic objects. An account is offered in terms of Optimality Theory, and it is shown that this has some advantages. An analysis of second position clitics in Tagalog (among other languages) is presented which accounts for a number of fundamental regularities that have had to be stipulated in previous accounts, and which demonstrates the range of areas of grammatical structure relevant to the OT account of a clitic system.

III. On Verb Second
Armed with an account of second position clitic phenomena, we return to the question of whether Verb-second facts have anything in common with these. We argue that essentially the same OT constraints that operate in placing grammatical clitics in second position in some languages serve to force syntactic Verb movement in others. Some consequences for the nature of "GEN" in the OT framework are drawn.

This is a three-day series to be held on January 29, 30 and 31.