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Merge, Restructuring, and Clitic Climbing in Spanish
Abstract
A well-studied phenomenon in Spanish (and in Romance languages in general) is clitic placement in constructions with so-called restructuring verbs, such as querer “want,” deber “must,” poder “can/may,” soler (habitual aspect), empezar “begin,” estar “be” – which are sometimes dubbed semi-auxiliary verbs, since they express modality and aspect – as well as the true auxiliary haber “have” (see Burzio, 1986; Cardinaletti & Shlonsky, 2004; Cinque, 2004, 2006; Perlmutter, 1983; Strozer, 1976; among many others). What is especially noteworthy about these constructions is that, when pronominal clitics are used, these may be associated either with the main finite verb or the lexical verb in a non-finite form.
... Furthermore, the theoretical view on CC in Medieval French has not been adapted since, despite the publication of major analyses of restructuring (Cinque, 2004;Wurmbrand, 2004). Additionally, important analyses of CC have been published recently for other Romance languages (Fischer, 2000;Martins, 2000;Solà, 2002;Cardinaletti and Shlonsky, 2004;de Andrade, 2010b;Roberts, 2010;Cardinaletti, 2014a;de Andrade and Namiuti-Temponi, 2016;Gallego, 2016;de Andrade and Bok-Bennema, 2017;Paradís, 2018;Masullo, 2019;Pescarini, 2021) and we will use them to contextualise the changes identified in the diachrony of French. In the next Chapter, we will discuss the methodology adopted for the research and we will account for the choice of a legal register. ...
This thesis explores the diachrony of clitic placement with infinitives (both in re- structuring and other infinitival clauses) in French in a corpus of legal texts from the mid-12th to the mid-19th century which was built as part of this research project. We find enclisis in non-restructuring clauses until ca. 1300, and clitic climbing (CC) in restructuring clauses until the late 18th century. The two orderings are subsequently replaced by proclisis. These findings challenge the view that enclisis and CC are necessarily found within the same system, as Middle French is a language with proclisis and CC. Furthermore, CC is the major ordering found in restructuring clauses in Old French, and its frequency tops 100% from the 14th to the early 17th century. This finding reveals that the construction was not optional in Middle French. This thesis develops a theory of cliticisation based on verb movement: we account for the shift from enclisis to proclisis in non-restructuring clauses with the loss of V-to-T movement with infinitives. Independent evidence for this hypothesis stems from the loss of infinitival suffix -r in early Middle French, which we show acted as a movement trigger in Old French. This proposal is further supported by the consideration of the crosslinguistic picture: Romance languages that have enclisis also have infinitival suffixes and V-movement to a high position (e.g. Standard Italian). Regarding CC, the analysis we propose is one of mono-clausal restructuring with cliticisation on the higher v-head. We argue that from the early 17th century on, the lower v-head is reanalysed as a cliticisation site, yielding proclisis. The diachrony of other Romance languages supports the view that cliticisation on the lower v is an innovation of late Medieval Romance. Unlike other canonical languages however, French did not retain the optionality of cliticisation on the higher v and proclisis generalised to all infinitival clauses.
The present volume includes a selection of twenty-one peer-reviewed and revised papers from the 37th annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at the University of Pittsburgh in 2007. The papers cover a range of topics in morphology, syntax, phonology and language acquisition. A number of languages and varieties are also analyzed, including Italian, Spanish, Judeo-Spanish, Old Spanish, French, Old French, and Romanian. Contributions include papers from three of the invited speakers, Heles Contreras, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and Julia Herschensohn. This volume highlights theoretical issues under current debate in Romance linguistics.
In what follows I would like to show how the articulated functional structure of the clause suggested in Cinque (1999) may shed new light on the “restructuring” phenomenon (Rizzi 1976a, b, 1978) and perhaps afford a deeper understanding of it. In the past twenty-five years, numerous analyses have been proposed to explain why certain phenomena that are otherwise clause-bound (such as Clitic Placement—see [1]) appear to be able to span over two clauses when the matrix verb is either a modal, an aspectual, or a motion verb and the complement is nonfinite (see the “climbing” of the clitic in [2]):1 Even if each of the proposed analyses captures one or another aspect of restructuring, it is fair to say that none of them manages to answer the two most basic questions that the phenomenon raises: namely, why it should exist at all and why it should exist with those particular verb classes (modal, aspectual, and motion). The fact that one finds transparency phenomena comparable to Clitic Climbing language after language, and with the same set of verbs (or subsets thereof), suggests that the phenomenon is universal and should thus follow from some general property ofUG.2 Here I would like to propose an analysis that derives its universality and answers at the same time the two basic questions just mentioned.
This book investigates in detail the grammar of polysynthetic languages-those with very complex verbal morphology. Baker argues that polysynthesis is more than an accidental collection of morphological processes; rather, it is a systematic way of representing predicate-argument relationships that is parallel to but distinct from the system used in languages like English. Having repercussions for many areas of syntax and related aspects of morphology and semantics, this argument results in a comprehensive picture of the grammar of polysynthetic languages. Baker draws on examples from Mohawk and certain languages of the American Southwest, Mesoamerica, Australia, and Siberia.
Pronominal clitics in Romance may either precede or follow the verb they are associated with, depending on a number of factors, some of which I shall try to elucidate in this article. My analysis will take Romance clitics to invariably left-adjoin to a functional head. In cases where that functional head dominates the verb, this will straightforwardly yield the order clitic-verb. The order verb-clitic will, on the other hand, be claimed to result from the verb’s having moved leftward past the functional head to which the clitic has adjoined (rather than having the clitic right-adjoin to the verb). I shall focus on the question of clitic/verb order as it applies to embedded sentences, leaving for future work certain extra possibilities that appear in root sentences such as imperatives, and in certain other types of root sentences in languages such as Portuguese and Galician.
The analysis of the French construction of Complex Inversion illustrated in (1) below raises difficulties with respect to current conceptions of available phrase structure:
(1)
a.
Jean est-il malade?
‘Is John sick?’
b.
Depuquis quand Jean est-il malade.
‘Since when is John sick.’
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In earlier work,1 we proposed that the contrast between French and Italian seen in the clitic climbing construction in (1) should be related to the contrast between them seen in (2) concerning null subjects:
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Verbs can be introduced (merged) in either a lexical VP or a functional head, the latter position giving rise to restructuring contexts. We argue that there are two clitic positions in Italian “restructured” clauses: one associated with the (restructured) lexical verb and the other a clausal clitic position located in the functional domain. While restructuring can be recursive, clitics appear either on the restructured infinitive (no clitic climbing) or in the functional domain of the highest verb (full clitic climbing). There is no clitic climbing to an intermediate restructuring verb. We argue that only the lowest restructured verb makes a position for clitics available and that this position is the same as that of infinitive-final [e]. Finally, we show that the functional ∼ lexical dichotomy is too sharp and that a variety of verb classes must be admitted, whose properties correlate with the point in the structure in which they are merged.
We began with the premise that doubling with DO- and IO-CLs requires that both elements of the chain agree in features. With IOs, doubling is universal because the features of the IO argument are practically irrelevant (section 1.1). However, since DO-CLs are inherently specific, this feature is crucial for DO-doubling to be grammatical. Animacy is the second feature necessary in most contexts. However, as pointed out in section 1.3.1, doubling may operate even in the absence of the latter. The same matching of features required of doubling constructions is required under extraction (a subset of doubling structures), hence, no special mechanisms are needed to reject ill-formed sentences. What causes ungrammaticality in extractions from CL-D DOs is a clash between the specific referential CL and a nonspecific interpreted object argument, a violation of the Matching Principle. Since lexical partitives and unagreement phenomena are productive ways to signal the specificity of the DO, extractions at LF and in the syntax proper can produce well-formed sentences (section 2.2). Moreover, the Matching Principle follows directly from the unique indexing peculiar to chain coindexing and Spec-head agreement.These results have two main consequences: (a) the hypothesis that CLs are agreement morphemes which do not absorb Case becomes viable. This claim is supported by the doubling of inanimates (section 1.3.1) and even of some animates (17) in the absence of a, by facts about Case with IOs (section 1.3.2), and by weak cross-over effects (section 3.1) where CLs-as-agreement serve to identify the relevant empty category. (b) Since extractions of both CL-D IOs (section 2.1) and CL-D DOs (section 2.2) are possible, it follows that CLs are not theta-role absorbers, because the doubled constituent must be in an argument position. The moral is that the absence of extraction does not itself show that the double is in an A' position. Rather one must look deeper to discover whether independent principles in the language can account for lack of extraction in such contexts.1
Finally, the assumption that datives in a CL-chain are NPs and not PPs (see Appendix) makes possible the generalization that contemporary Spanish CLs — whether direct or indirect — enter only into nominal chains, a generalization confirmed by their parallel behavior with respect to weak crossover and scope (sections 3.1–3.2). This conclusion brings the analysis of Spanish in line with those of French and Rumanian (Steriade 1980/81) where datives have been argued to be NPs, and it opens the door for the possibility that datives in all the Romance languages might be nominal in nature.2
This volume collects the recent published articles of Guglielmo Cinque of the University of Venice, one of the world's top linguists. The book is divided into two sections, the first on restructuring, a central topic in Romance syntax and with connections to other language groups as well. The second part focuses on the consequences of treating clausal functional heads as members of a universal hierarchy in the domain of morphpsyntax, offering a new perspective on many intricate problems arising in a variety of natural languages.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1985. MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES Bibliography: v.3, leaves 680-691. by Mark Cleland Baker. Ph.D.
Thesis (M.A.)--University of Washington, 1990. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [79]-82).
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1992 The present work purports to be a contribution to a better understanding of the nature of Case Theory in the Principles and Parameters approach (GB), while presenting independent evidence in favor of some current proposals relating to Case Theory, more specifically, Baker's (1988) Incorporation Theory, as well as Koopman and Sportiche's (1988) and Contreras' (1992) claims regarding nominative case assignment.In chapter 1 I provide a unified account of dative constructions, arguing that dative is a structural rather than inherent case in Spanish, and that it arises as a result of the incorporation of several lexical categories into the verb, viz. prepositions, substantives (Plann, 1986), adjectives, verbs in causative constructions, and nouns in light verb and possessor raising constructions.In chapter 2 I provide independent evidence for Belletti and Rizzi's (1988) analysis of quirky datives in psych verb constructions, extending it to other predicate types, as well as to other non-nominative constituents. I propose that quirky subjects in the world's languages can be classified into two types: those that occupy Spec (IP) as an A position (the Icelandic case), and those that occupy Spec (IP) as an A-bar position (the Spanish case). A parameter is proposed for the second type which predicts that a language will allow "quirky" subjects only if nominative case is assigned via government by lexical AGR in that language.In chapter 3 I deal with the multifarious uses of the clitic se in Spanish. Drawing on Baker's (1988) analysis for its impersonal use, I argue that se can be viewed as a nominal head lacking both phi and specific semantic features that incorporates either into INFL or the verb, the argumental role it plays depending on the particular construction in which it occurs. It will be shown that se can stand not only for the external argument, but also for subcategorized internal arguments of various kinds.Finally, in chapter 4 I argue that bare NPs are defective constituents which have not projected to their maximal functional value (the determiner phrase), and that therefore they cannot be identified by means of structural case alone, requiring instead stricter licensing means, such as inherent case or incorporation. A parallel is drawn between the argumental and predicative uses of bare nominals by claiming that they lack a referential index in the sense of Rizzi (1990), especially when selected by "light" verbs and prepositions.
Papers on Case and Agreement II
- Phillips
Clitics in Spanish (unpublished doctoral dissertation)
- J Strozer
Hacia un algoritmo para la fusión sintáctica
- Contreras
Papers on Case and Agreement I
- Bobaljik
Complex Predicates: A Direct Merge Analysis. Paper presented at the Australian Linguistics Society Meeting
- P Masullo
On the Properties of LF
- Hurtado
Verb Movement, and PRO; citation_author=Kayne, R.; citation_publication_date=1991; citation_journal_title=Linguistic Inquiry
- Clitics
Ascenso de clíticos y Long-Distance Agreement como variantes del mismo fenómeno
- H Bertora
Colin (1993) Papers on Case and Agreement I, MIT Working Papers in Liguistics
- Jonathan D Bobaljik
- Phillips
Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Reidel
- L Burzio
Relativized Minimality and Logical Form
- P Masullo
Papers on Case and Agreement II, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics
- C Phillips
Relativized Minimality
- L Rizzi