Clitic Positioning in Ossetic

We present data regarding the positioning of clitics in the Iron dialect of Ossetic, which is in some respects similar to data for ‘second-position’ clitics in more familiar languages, but in other respects is considerably more complicated. We propose a formal analysis which makes use of Optimality Theoretic LFG with stochastic re-ranking of constraints, which is able to capture the full range of the data, while avoiding having to assume the controversial phenomenon of clitic ‘movement’.