The Spanish pronominal clitic system.

In this paper we present a model of the Spanish pronominal clitic system. We start with a review of the phenomenon, including simple and complex clitic climbing and the related phenomena of reflexives, and also the impersonal passive-reflexive and active-impersonal forms. We also review the status of pronominal clitics and propose that it is a dual phenomenon: on the one hand, enclitics are inflections while proclitics are proper clitics that are realized as independent lexical units. Then the formalization of the model in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar is presented; for this the standard machinery of HPSG is extended with one combination scheme, the Head-Proclitic Rule, and one principle, the clitic principle. This principle states that in well-formed clitic sentences every clitic domain is within the scope of a single phonological host. The notions of clitic domain and clitic scope are also introduced in this paper, in addition to the operations of clitizisation, composition and subsumption through which clitic domains are produced. An implementation of the theory in Linguistics Knowledge Building is also presented.