Spanish Clitic Climbing: a Study of the Distribution of Direct Object Pronouns

This study analyzes direct object clitics and clitic climbing structures in Spanish. There exists a rich body of literature on the nature and distribution of object clitics in Romance, addressing a diversity of questions, among these, whether clitics behave as independent words or bound morphemes, and how and where they are to be represented in the structure of a sentence. To date, French and Italian have been the primary focus of attention in research addressing clitics; the facts of Spanish have gone largely unexamined. Redressing this oversight, this study examines data on the placement of clitics across dialects of Spanish. The findings afford a more complete account of clitics in Romance than is available in the extant literature and contribute to theories of syntactic micro-variation. At the center of this study is the development of a proposal in which clitics may be generated in two structural positions, as dictated by the selectional properties of certain predicates. This proposal is novel in focusing specifically on the analysis of clitics in Spanish and in seeking to achieve an adequate and complete description of these elements both morphologically and syntactically.