LINGUIST List 20.531
Thu Feb 19 2009
Diss: Morphology/Syntax: González López: 'Spanish Clitic Climbing'
Editor for this issue: Evelyn Richter
<evelynlinguistlist.org>
1. Verónica
González López,
Spanish Clitic Climbing
Message 1: Spanish Clitic Climbing
Date: 19-Feb-2009
From: Verónica González López <gonzalezvdenison.edu>
Subject: Spanish Clitic Climbing
E-mail this message to a friend
Institution: Pennsylvania State University
Program: Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2008
Author: Verónica González López
Dissertation Title: Spanish Clitic Climbing
Linguistic Field(s):
Morphology
Syntax
Subject Language(s): Asturian (ast)
Italian (ita)
Portuguese (por)
Spanish (spa)
Dissertation Director:
Almeida Jacqueline Toribio
Barbara Bullock
Marie Gillette
Karlos Arregi
John Lipski
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation focuses on the study of direct object clitics and cliticclimbing structures in Spanish. Clitic pronouns in the Romance languageshave long occupied the interests of generative linguists. In the field ofmorpho-syntax there exists a rich body of literature on the nature anddistribution of object clitic pronouns in Romance, addressing a diversityof questions, among these, whether clitic pronouns behave as independentwords or bound morphemes, and how and where they are to be represented inthe grammatical structure of a sentence. The answers to such questions havehad implications for the advancement of theories and models in other fieldsof study, such as language contact and language acquisition. To date,French and Italian have been the primary focus of attention in researchaddressing clitic pronouns; the facts of Spanish have gone largelyunexamined. Redressing this oversight, the present project examines data onthe placement of pronouns across dialects of Spanish. The findings willafford a more complete account of clitic pronouns in Romance than isavailable in the extant literature and contribute to theories of syntacticmicro-variation.
Unlike other Romance languages, Spanish allows clitic pronouns to appearattached to the non-finite verb, as in (1a) and (2a), or attached to themain conjugated verb, as in (1b) and (2b), a phenomenon known as 'cliticclimbing':
(1) a. Estoy comiéndolo. am.1sg eating.Cl b. Lo estoy comiendo. Cl am.1sg eating 'I am eating it'
(2) a. Quiero comerlo. want to.eat.Cl b. Lo quiero comer. Cl want to.eat 'I want to eat it'
The facts of clitic placement across dialects of Spanish (Castilian Spanishand North Western Spanish) and in other Romance languages (Italian,Portuguese, and Asturian) are carefully examined, with the aim ofpresenting an account of clitic climbing that is empirically andexplanatorily sound. At the center of the present study is the developmentof a proposal in which clitic pronouns may be generated in two structuralpositions in the clause, as dictated by the selectional properties ofparticular predicates.
The intellectual merit of this proposal resides principally inunderstanding the mechanisms that govern the placement of clitic pronounsin clitic climbing structures. It is novel in focusing specifically on theanalysis of clitic pronouns in Spanish and in seeking to achieve anadequate and complete description of these elements both morphologicallyand syntactically. A broader contribution of the work is its focus onreaching a better understanding not only of Spanish clitic pronouns, butalso of Spanish syntactic structure in general, as the study of cliticplacement largely overlaps with other areas of syntactic research, such asverb movement.
|