Clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a w ...

climbing is a phenomenon first identified in

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...

in which a pronominal object of an embedded

infinitive Infinitive (abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is deri ...

appears attached to the matrix verb. Pronominal objects in Romance languages are typically expressed as clitics. The following Italian example illustrates the phenomenon. The object pronoun, lo, a clitic, is attached to the infinitive in the embedded or subordinate clause in (1a). In (1b), the clitic has "climbed" to the main or matrix clause and is attached to the matrix verb. There is no discernible difference in meaning between the two forms. : Clitic climbing is found in almost all Romance languages. It is notably absent in French.

Other language families

Austronesian

Tagalog

Clitic climbing is also found in Tagalog. As in the

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...

example in (1) above, the embedded clause clitic, ''siya'' "her", in (2a) can optionally appear in the matrix clause as in (2b). : Only clitics from embedded clauses in which the verb does not exhibit any aspectual

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

can climb to the matrix clause in Tagalog. :{, , (3) , , a. , , , , S‹in›abi.∅ , , ni , , Juan , , na , , d‹in›alaw.∅=siya , , ni , , Pedro. , - , , , , , , , ‹›say. , , , , Juan , , , , ‹›visit.= , , , , Pedro , - , , , , , , , colspan=7 , "Juan said that Pedro visited her." , - , , , , , , , colspan=7 , (or "Juan said that she was visited by Pedro.") , - , , , b. , , * , , S‹in›abi.∅=siya , , ni , , Juan , , na , , d‹in›alaw.∅ , , ni , , Pedro. , - , , , , , , , ‹›say.= , , , , Juan , , , , ‹›visit. , , {{sc, gen , , Pedro , - , , , , , , , colspan=7 , "Juan said that Pedro visited her." , - , , , , , , , colspan=7 , (or "Juan said that she was visited by Pedro.") So, the sentence in (2b) is grammatical because the embedded verb, ''dalawin'' "to be visited", is not marked for any aspect, whereas the sentence in (3b) is ungrammatical because clitic climbing has occurred out of the embedded clause in which the verb, ''dinalaw'' "was visited", is marked for the

perfective aspect The perfective aspect (abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole; i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the imp ...

References

Rizzi, Luigi. 1978. A Restructuring Rule in Italian Syntax. In Recent Transformational Studies in European Languages, ed. Samuel J. Keyser, 113-158. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Romance languages Syntax Units of linguistic morphology