linguistics

Pronominal object clitics in preverbal position are a hard nut to crack for Google Translate

Some Romance languages allow the movement of pronominal object clitics to the preverbal position (Hanson & Carlson, 2014; Labotka et al., 2023). That is, instead of saying La maestra lo ha detto (Italian) ‘The teacher has said it’, it is possible to say Lo ha detto la maestra ‘It has said the teacher’. The latter is a marked phrasing that increases the attention to the subject of the sentence. Furthermore, when the clitic is in preverbal position, the degree of focus on the subject is also dependent on the context.