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.