Clitic climbing in archaic Chinese

Object pronouns in archaic Chinese negated clauses were required to move out of VP and cliticize to the negator. Cliticization was gradually lost, however, beginning with clitic climbing from embedded clauses. A mysterious exception to the loss of clitic climbing was that raising remained obligatory when the matrix subject was the negative quantifier mo ‘none’. In this chapter, I propose that cases involving mo ‘none’ are not exceptions if we assume Hornstein’s (1999, 2001) movement analysis of control. Under this analysis, the matrix subject mo ‘none’ is base merged in the embedded clause and subsequently moves to its surface position in the matrix clause. Cliticization takes place locally in the embedded clause before movement of the subject. The appearance of clitic climbing is then the result of pied-piping of the pronoun as the subject raises. Given this analysis, cliticization in the classical period can be viewed as uniformly clause-bound. This chapter additionally proposes an analysis of the origin of the negator fu. I argue that fu was not derived through the fusion of the negator bu and a raised third person object pronoun zhi. Rather, I suggest that fu be analyzed as the fusion of bu and the causative prefix /*s-/.