The internal structure of dative clitics

In this paper I look into some problems concerning Catalan third person dative clitics, with a focus on their internal structure. These clitics show a number of structural and distributive irregularities that seem to reveal something fundamental missing from the picture. By looking at their morphological structure, I will show that we deconstruct them into simpler components, which include definiteness and deixis. With this inquiry I hope to extract some generalizations on the structure of dative clitics in Romance as well as the nature of dative case itself.