In a textbook example of grammaticalisation, stressed pronouns may become unstressed or clitic pronouns over time, and may further weaken into affixes or be lost altogether. The loss of specific clitic pronoun forms leads to situations in which clitic pronoun paradigms are defective: clitic forms are available for some slots in the paradigm but not others. In this paper recently published in Languages, Sandra investigates the expression (and non-expression) of clitic object pronouns in a set of closely related languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Raeto-Romance, some northeastern Italo-Romance varieties, and French. These languages turn out to differ in ways that suggest a rather bumpy continuum, with shared tendencies for some forms in clitic pronoun paradigms to have been lost more often than others. Turning to diachronic change, Sandra shows how microvariation across the languages investigated helps to demonstrate the role of Person, animacy, specificity and Case in the diachronic process of clitic loss, and points towards more general lessons for our understanding of language change. Congratulations, Sandra!