Clitic Climbing in Polish Tense Auxiliary Constructions

The aim of this paper is to account for the behaviour of Polish pronom-inal clitics in tense auxiliary constructions. In particular, we discuss the phenomenon known as clitic climbing (CC) and provide its HPSG account. Unlike Romance or Germanic languages, Polish employs only one tense auxiliary verb by´c 'be'. The future tense of imperfective verbs is formed with the strong form of the auxiliary: (4.1) Ty you be dziesz will.be.2sg widzia l seen ten this film. film 'You will see this film.' As argued in [Borsley and Rivero(1994)], past tense, (4.2a), and conditional verbs, (4.2b), are formed with an auxiliary as well: (4.2) a. Ty you widziaa l seen-e´s AUX.2sg ten this film. film 'You saw this film.' b. Ty you widziaa l seen-by´s AUX-COND.2sg ten this film. book 'You would see this film.' Although (e)´ s and by´s in (4.2) look like verbal inflection, they can be detached from the verb and occur on (almost) any other preceding word, 1 (4.3) (see [Booij and Rubach(1987)] or [Spencer(1991), ch.9] for more examples).