Clitic Climbing and Null Subject Languages

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to derive Clitic Climbing from restructuring together with the Null Subject property. Data are drawn mainly from Catalan. I propose a biclausal analysis for restructuring constructions in which clitic climbing (like any clitic-Argument dependencies) is analysed as an A-dependency, assuming that clitics are AGR-heads which check features in the Agreement-Case system. Clitic climbing would be then a «long distance» A-dependency, which is made possible by assuming that restructuring is always raising, and that raising in NSLs is a transparent struc- ture for A-dependencies, due to the nature of Nominative Case checking in these languages. To this end, a reformulation of locality conditions for checking (Agree, Chomsky 1998) is needed, which has some independent plausibility.