Position of Polish Clitics: An HPSG Account

Anna Kupsc
Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Computer Science /
TALANA, Universite Paris7
aniak@ipipan.waw.pl

In this paper we deal with the distribution of Polish pronominal clitics. They have no fixed position within a clause and we treat them as postlexical clitics, i.e., syntactic items (e.g., they undergo such purely syntactic processes as ellipsis). Their distribution, however, is not unconstrained and differs from that of strong forms. Roughly speaking, pronominal clitics can occur anywhere to the left of the verb while postverbally they can appear only if adjacent to the verb. The position of Polish clitics is a challenge for an account of linearization based on linear precedence (LP) rules which refer to syntactic categories, as commonly used in HPSG. Such LP rules are defined as general well-formedness constraints imposed on linguistic objects. Hence, if we propose such an LP rule that forces preverbal positions of clitics, the immediately postverbal positions are excluded. In order to resolve this problem, we adopt the topological fields approach of Kathol 1995 rather than LP rules. We split a clause into preverbal, verbal and postverbal fields. Both clitics and a verb can occur within the verbal field. No other elements are licensed within this field. Additionally, clitics may appear within the preverbal field but they are excluded from the postverbal one. This analysis allows us to account for all positions of clitics within a clause.