Restructuring Verbs in Italian HPSG Grammar

1 Introduction Restructuring verbs (Rizzi 1982) exhibit certain properties: they trigger clitic climbing, long NP-Movement and auxiliary change. The aim of this paper is to propose a mechanism which is able to give a unitary account of this class of verbs. The analysis will focus mainly on the first two properties and will be carried out within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Pollard & Sag 1987, Pollard & Sag 1993). Given the nonlocal character of clitic climbing and long NP-Movement, it seems appropriate to propose an approach in terms of nonlocal features and the Nonlocal Feature Principle, which is the mechanism used within HPSG to deal with long distance dependencies. It will be shown that this mechanism doesn't account for clitic climbing in an adequate way; it doesn't naturally capture the fact that only a specific class of verbs trigger it. Furthermore it doesn't account for long NP-Movement in an elegant way. An alternative analysis in terms of argument composition will be adopted; it is based on the idea that the arguments of a verb governed by a restructuring verb can be raised to become arguments of the governor. The effect achieved is similar to a lexical analysis of functional composition as developed within the tradition of Categorial Grammar. This approach is able to give a unified account of clitic climbing and long NP-Movement and it can be easily extended to handle similar phenomena in other languages. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 introduces the basic facts about restructuring verbs in Italian. Section 3 gives an outline of the middle si construction in Italian since it interacts in a crucial way with restructuring verbs. Section 4 shows that a treatment in terms of nonlocal features and the Nonlocal I would like to thank Ivan Sag, Anne Abeillé and Andreas Kathol for comments and suggestions. Feature Principle does not provide a satisfactory solution. In section 5, an analysis in terms of argument composition will be proposed. It will be shown that the mechanism is adequate to handle the relevant data in an elegant way. Section 6 contains some concluding remarks. There are three classes of verbs which trigger clitic climbing, long NP-Movement and auxiliary change: The verbs in (1) will be referred to as restructuring verbs, after Rizzi(1982) who proposed a restructuring rule in order to account for the phenomena triggered by them. Restructuring …