Clitic Climbing and Tense Auxiliaries in Polish and Romance
Anna Kupsc
Abstract : The aim of this paper is to compare the behaviour of Polish and Romance pronominal clitics in tense auxiliary constructions and to account for Polish facts. First, we present the system of Polish auxiliaries, briefly comparing it to Romance. Then, we discuss clitic climbing (CC), the phenomenon well-known in Romance. We contrast Polish CC with CC in Italian and French. Finally, we present a formal analysis of Polish CC. Our analysis is coached within the framework of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, (Pollard & Sag, 1987; Pollard & Sag, 1994)), which has been also used to account for CC in Romance. We follow (Borsley, 1999) in treating Polish auxiliaries as syntactic items. However, we do not find his argumentation strong enough to motivate the adaptation of the analysis proposed for French auxiliaries, (Abeillé & Godard, 1994), to Polish. We account for CC in Polish assuming that clitics can be realised independently of non-clitic arguments. Such an approach correctly explains optionality of CC in Polish without specifying what the constituent structure of auxiliary constructions looks like.