There has been much recent debate about whether special clitic placement in general, and in the South Slavic languages, in particular, can be handled exclusively through the exploitation of familiar syntactic categories and movement mechanisms, or whether some special phonological reordering is required, such as Halpern's "Prosodic Inversion". This debate has primarily concentrated on Serbian/Croatian and, to a lesser extent, Bulgarian. In this paper I champion the syntactic approach, reviewing existing arguments why Serbian/Croatian clitic placement demands syntactic means and presenting some novel ones. I also extend the analysis to Slovenian and Macedonian, showing how these languages differ from Serbian/Croatian and Bulgarian. I argue that Slavic special clitics require syntactic support in the form of head adjunction, and that when no head independently moves up to them to check its own features, the clitics themselves move, raising, or when that option is unavailable, actually lowering overtly to a host head.

The program of placing Slavic clitics syntactically faces a challenge in that there are some obvious phonological effects which need to be built into the system. I defend a "filtering" approach, in which the results of strictly syntactic movements are modulated by the phonology. Thus, the syntax will generate certain orders that "crash" at PF because the clitics are not supported prosodically.

I also address the difference between the second-position (Wackernagel) type clitics, as in Serbian/Croatian, Slovenian and Czech, and the Macedonian and Bulgarian verb-adjacent type. I argue that all Slavic clitics are functional heads, citing Czech data which suggest even that a single morpheme can alternate between functional and substantive status, with its ability to function as a clitic varying accordingly. Second position pronominal clitics are generated in the appropriate argument positions, presumably as D or K heads. All special clitics have strong case features, requiring them to adjoin to Agr heads overtly. But they also need to be adjoined to the substantive head that licenses them, typically, the verb. The basic idea is thus that they raise from argument position to Agr and then keep on moving until they reach the highest functional head in the phrase structure, where they must stop and "wait" for the verb to get there at LF. This is what happens in the case of second-position clitics. Verb-adjacent clitics, on the other hand, are generated directly in Agr rather than in argument position, so that the verb literally "comes to them".