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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

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French clitic climbing as periphrasis

 | Université de Paris, LLF, CNRS
 | Université de Paris, LLF, CNRS
Published online: 16 October 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00039.agu
Summary
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 ( 2002. The syntactic structure of French auxiliaries. Language, 78(3), 404–452. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) 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, O. 2015. Periphrasis as collocation. Morphology, 25(1), 63–110. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, we provide a treatment of the climbing facts that does full justice to the limited mobility and their morphologically bound status (Miller, P. H. 1992. Clitics and constituents in phrase structure grammar. Garland, New York.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) 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.
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
References (50)
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