Spanish Clitic Climbing

This study analyzes direct objectclitics and clitic climbing structures in Spanish.There exists a rich body of literature on the natureand distribution of object clitics in Romanceaddressing a diversity of questions among thesewhether clitics behave as independent words or boundmorphemes and how and where they are to berepresented in the structure of a sentence. To dateFrench and Italian have been the primary focus ofattention in research addressing clitics; the factsof Spanish have gone largely unexamined. Redressingthis oversight this study examines data on theplacement of clitics across dialects of Spanish. Thefindings afford a more complete account ofclitics in Romance than is available in the extantliterature and contribute to theories of syntacticmicro-variation. At the center of this studyis the development of a proposal in which clitics maybe generated in two structural positions as dictatedby the selectional properties of certain predicates.This proposal is novel in focusing specifically onthe analysis of clitics in Spanish and in seeking toachieve an adequate and complete description of theseelements both morphologically and syntactically.