AN HPSG ACCOUNT OF CLITIC CLIMBING IN POLISH VERB CLUSTERS

The aim of this paper is to present an HPSG analysis of Clitic Climbing (CC)
in Polish infinitive verbal complexes. 

Clitic Climbing is a well-known phenomenon present in Romance languages but also
in Slavic. In certain verbal environments, a pronominal clitic
needn't be realised on a verb it is a semantic argument of but the clitic
can `climb' to a governing verb: 

(1)  Jan  chcial go     przestac zapraszac. 
     John wanted him_cl stop_inf invite_inf

    `John wanted to stop inviting him.'

In Polish, CC is possible in complementizerless infinitival verbal
complexes, cf. (1), which we call verb clusters (VC). As observed in Dyla
(1983), not all VC behave uniformly with respect to CC. CC is possible to
most subject control verbs, e.g., `chciec' (want) or `przestac' (stop),
cf. (1), but `obiecac' +NP[dat] or `przyrzec' +NP[dat] (promise) do not allow
for CC, cf. (2). 

(2)  *Marek obiecal  go     Joli     zaprosic.
      Mark  promised him_cl Jola_dat invite_inf

     `Mark promised Jola to invite him.'

Object control verbs such as `uczyc' +NP[acc] (teach) or 
`przeszkadzac' +NP[dat] (prevent) do not allow CC, either,
(3a). It might seem that the presence of a nominal argument blocks
CC. Note, however, that `causative' or `prohibitive' (object control) 
verbs, e.g., `kazac +NP[dat] (order) in (3b), do allow CC although they
have a nominal argument. Therefore, we assume here that verbs which allow
for CC in Polish are lexically specified.

(3) a. *Chcial    przeszkodzic go     Piotrowi  zaprosic.
        wanted-he disturb_inf  him_cl Peter_dat invite_inf
       `He wanted to prevent Peter from inviting him.'

    b.  Jan powinien kazac/    zabronic   go     Piotrowi  zapraszac. 
        John ought   order_inf forbid_inf him_cl Peter_dat invite_inf
       `John ought to order/forbid Peter to invite him.'

CC in Polish is more relaxed than that in Romance languages. First, it is
always optional, i.e., a clitic can be either realised locally or climbs as in
(1). Second, if there are several clitic co-arguments, they needn't occur
on the same verb in VC. These properties carry over to the inherent
(reflexive) clitic. In Romance, CC is often taken to affect the
syntactic structure of the verbal complex. However, traditional
constituency tests applied to Polish VC do not show any structural
difference with respect to CC or lack thereof. This is particularly
puzzling since Polish pronominal clitics are syntactic items and, hence,
contribute to the constituent structure.  


Pronominal clitics have different properties than other NPs and they should
be distinguished. In the framework of HPSG (Pollard and Sag (1994)) we
adopt, this can be done by splitting the `synsem' type into `clitic' and
`non-clitic' subtypes. In such a setup, clitics retain  usual
properties of NPs, such as referentiality, person, number or gender
information, and simultaneously one may easily encode information specific
only for clitics, e.g., linear order. We represent clitics as NP-arguments of a
verb, i.e., as elements of the valence COMPLEMENTS (COMPS) attribute. Since the
value of this attribute is a list of `synsem' objects, both `clitic's and
`non-clitic's can occur there; no special mechanisms for realisation of clitics
are necessary. We encode CC lexically and apply to Polish VC an `argument
composition' approach of Hinrichs and Nakazawa (1990). A VC-verb `inherits'
(via token-identity) complements of its infinitive complement. We do not
specify the COMPS value of the infinitive in the lexicon. Thus, the COMPS
list may be empty (no CC) or not (CC). As 
we said before, CC in VC is possible only with certain verbs. We capture
this fact by requiring VC-verbs which block CC to inherit only
`non-clitic's from their infinitive complement, i.e., the infinitive COMPS
is a list of  
`non-clitic's. Since the syntactic structure of VC is unclear and immune to
CC, we assume that clitics may climb independently of other arguments. We
provide a syntactic principle which licenses phrases with a
number of unrealised clitic arguments (if the syntactic structure of VC is
hierarchical). This principle accounts for optionality of CC: VP[inf]'s COMPS
contains either (several) clitics (CC) or no clitics (no CC).
Moreover, the principle licenses phrases with any number
of clitics left unrealised. This allows us to capture the fact that
clitics may climb to different verbs in VC. 



References:

@Article{Dyla (1983)
  author = 	 "Stefan Dy{\l}a",
  title = 	 "Evidence for {S}-deletion in {P}olish",
  journal = 	 fl,
  year = 	 1983,
  volume =	 "XVII",
  pages =	 "327--337",
  publisher =    "Mouton",
  address =      "The Hague"}

@Book{Pollard and Sag (1994)
  author =       "Carl Pollard and Ivan A. Sag",
  title =        "{H}ead-driven {P}hrase {S}tructure {G}rammar",
  publisher =    "Chicago University Press",
  address =      "Chicago",
  year =         1994}