Spanish clitic climbing
This dissertation focuses on the study of direct object clitics and clitic climbing structures in Spanish. Clitic pronouns in the Romance languages have long occupied the interests of generative linguists. In the field of morpho-syntax there exists a rich body of literature on the nature and distribution of object clitic pronouns in Romance, addressing a diversity of questions, among these, whether clitic pronouns behave as independent words or bound morphemes, and how and where they are to be represented in the grammatical structure of a sentence. The answers to such questions have had implications for the advancement of theories and models in other fields of study, such as language contact and language acquisition. To date, French and Italian have been the primary focus of attention in research addressing clitic pronouns; the facts of Spanish have gone largely unexamined. Redressing this oversight, the present project examines data on the placement of pronouns across dialects of Spanish. The findings will afford a more complete account of clitic pronouns in Romance than is available in the extant literature and contribute to theories of syntactic micro-variation
Downloadable Article, English, 2008