Delayed Tree-Locality, Set-locality, and Clitic Climbing

Since Bleam's (2000) initial claim that capturing clitic climbing patterns in Romance requires the descriptive power of set-local MCTAG (Weir, 1988), alternative approaches to relaxing tree-locality restrictions have been developed, including delayed tree-local MCTAG (Chiang and Scheffler, 2008), which, unlike set-local MCTAG, is weakly equivalent to standard TAG. This paper compares 2-delayed treelocal MCTAG with set-local MCTAG in terms of how well the two formalisms can account for the clitic climbing data. We confirm that 2-delay tree-local MCTAG has the formal expressivity to cover the data by proposing an explicit grammar to do so. However, we also find that the constraint on set locality is particularly well-suited for capturing these clitic climbing patterns. I.e., though globally less restrictive, set-local MCTAG appears to be restrictive in just the right way in this specific case.