Spanish Clitic Climbing

This study analyzes direct object§clitics and clitic climbing structures in Spanish.§There exists a rich body of literature on the nature§and distribution of object clitics in Romance,§addressing a diversity of questions, among these,§whether clitics behave as independent words or bound§morphemes, and how and where they are to be§represented in the structure of a sentence. To date,§French and Italian have been the primary focus of§attention in research addressing clitics; the facts§of Spanish have gone largely unexamined. Redressing§this oversight, this study examines data on the§placement of clitics across dialects of Spanish. The§findings afford a more complete account of§clitics in Romance than is available in the extant§literature and contribute to theories of syntactic§micro-variation. At the center of this study§is the development of a proposal in which clitics may§be generated in two structural positions, as dictated§by the selectional properties of certain predicates.§This proposal is novel in focusing specifically on§the analysis of clitics in Spanish and in seeking to§achieve an adequate and complete description of these§elements both morphologically and syntactically.