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Article published In:
Interfaces in Romance: A constraint-based approach
Edited by Gabriela Bîlbîie
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes 43:1] 2020
► pp. 23–61

French clitic climbing as periphrasis

| Université de Paris, LLF, CNRS
| Université de Paris, LLF, CNRS

In this article, we propose a treatment of French clitic climbing as an instance of morphological periphrasis. In particular we reexamine the evidence in favour of argument composition and a flat VP structure with tense auxiliaries (Abeillé & Godard, 2002) and show (i) that the V (vs. VP) status of the complement does not strictly correlate with the possibility of clitic climbing, (ii) that transparency in bounded dependencies transcends the class of argument composition verbs, and (iii) that a flat VP structure complicates the treatment of modification and coordination. Adopting an approach in terms of periphrastic realisation along the lines of Bonami (2015), we provide a treatment of the climbing facts that does full justice to the limited mobility and their morphologically bound status (Miller, 1992) without having to rely on a flat VP structure. Finally, we show that the pronominalisation and extraction facts can be dealt with in a uniform fashion by way of constraints on canonical vs. non-canonical argument realisation.

Keywords: clitic climbing, periphrasis, French VP, flat structure, hierarchical structure
Article outline
  • 1.The classical HPSG approach: Climbing by argument composition
  • 2.Discussion
    • 2.1Dissociation between clitic climbing and VP structure
      • 2.1.1More periphrastic tenses: Futur proche and passé récent
      • 2.1.2Predicatives and passives
      • 2.1.3Fronting of lexical V
    • 2.2Bounded dependencies
    • 2.3Manner adverb placement
    • 2.4Coordination
  • 3.Periphrasis
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Argument realisation
    • 4.2Inflectional morphology
    • 4.3Clitic climbing as periphrasis
    • 4.4Constraints on fronting and pronominalisation
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 October 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00039.agu
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