Publikation
Clitic Climbing Revisited
Berthold Crysmann
In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Pages 67-89, CSLI, 2003.
Zusammenfassung
Presently, there is overall consent among researchers on Romance in HPSG (Miller and Sag, 1997, Abeillé et al., 1998, Monachesi, 1996, 1999) that bounded clitic climbing (CC) is best understood in terms of argument composition. Despite the fact that all current analyses of CC are based on the same core idea, individual analyses of this phenomenon differ, though, as to the technical implementation: in par- ticular, there does not appear to be agreement as to which structure, arg-st (Miller and Sag, 1997) or comps (Monachesi, 1996, 1999), pro- vides the primary basis for composition. Furthermore, they all make use of book-keeping devices, be it the clts list, or the subtyping of lexical signs, synsem objects and head values, whose specific workings are highly tailored to the particular language under discussion. As a result, the clts-list Monachesi (1996, 1999) invokes for Italian is in itself insufficient to capture the facts about participle agreement in French. Similarly, Miller and Sag's (1997) approach can only cover the Italian data at the expense of auxiliary types whose explanatory potential is fairly limited. In this paper, I shall propose a unified approach that will be applicable to CC in both French and Italian. The approach will be cast entirely in terms of valence lists, argument structure and slash, such that construction- or language-specific book-keeping devices can be eliminated. As a side-effect, this approach provides a more strength- ened view of lexical integrity, in that morphological information, i..e. an argument's mode of realisation, will not be directly accessible for subcategorisation.