Clitic Climbing in Polish Verb Clusters: an HPSG Approach

The aim of this paper is to compare clitic climbing (CC) in Polish and Romance and then provide an HPSG account of CC in Polish. We discuss CC in the complementizerless verbal complexes, which we call verb clusters (VC). Both the behaviour of Polish clitics and properties of VC are different in Polish and Romance. Although we apply (‘standard’ for HPSG) lexical encoding to account for CC, our analysis differs from those proposed for Romance. We treat Polish clitics as syntactic items and assume that they can be realised independently of other arguments. This allows us to account for optionality of Polish CC and simultaneously preserve the underlying syntactic structure of VC. 7.1 CC in Polish and Romance In Polish, as in Romance, CC is possible only in certain environments. In this paper1 we discuss the interaction of pronominal clitics with infinitival complementation.2 In Italian, CC is possible with ‘restructuring verbs’, cf. e.g., [Riz82], while in French, causative verbs such as faire ‘make’, may attract clitic arguments of their infinitive complements, cf. e.g., [Kay75]. In Polish, CC is possible in complementizerless infinitival verbal complexes, which we call verb clusters (VC).3 As observed in [Dył83], not all VCs behave uniformly with respect to CC. CC is possible with most subject control verbs, e.g., chcieć ‘want’ or przestać ‘stop’, (7.1a), but obiecać +NP[dat] or przyrzec +NP[dat] ‘promise’ do not allow CC, cf. (7.1b).4 The research presented in this paper has been partly supported by the EU CRIT-2 grant. Data presented in this paper do not deal with all aspects of CC in Polish. First, they do not take into account the so-called haplology of the reflexive marker sie ↪ ‘self’. The analysis of this phenomenon is presented in [Kup99b]. Second, CC in Polish is more constrained than presented here: clitic arguments of a ‘lower’ verb cannot climb over clitic arguments of the ‘higher’ verb. We deal with this issue in [Kup99d]. As in Romance, CC is possible also in tense auxiliary constructions. See [Kup99a] for an analysis. In (7.1)–(7.3), go ‘him’ is a semantic argument of the ‘lowest’ infinitive.