Semantic Interpretation Vs. Lexical Governance: Clitic Climbing in Italian

Abstract

The syntactic rule of Restructuring explains the syntactic properties of so-called ‘Clitic Climbing’ sentences in Italian. However, Restructuring alone fails to account for the semantic properties of such sentences. This paper argues that lexical governance of Restructuring is inadequate. Instead, a syntactic rule operating freely whenever its structural description is met, and followed by semantic interpretation rules, not only adequately but insightfully handles the data. A crucial claim is that the derived structure of the verbal complex in a restructured sentence is identical to that of a complex of auxiliary + past participle, so that the same semantic interpretation rules apply to both.

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