On the climbing of the particle suo in Mandarin Chinese and its implications for the theory of clitic placement

Abstract

Assuming with Ting (Journal of East Asian Linguistics 12: 121–139, 2003) that the derivation of the particle suo in (Mandarin) Chinese targets V/I/T categories on a par with Romance pronominal clitics, I investigate the comparable climbing phenomenon of suo in Chinese. An important generalization that emerges from this comparison is that in contrast to the monoclausal properties in Romance clitic climbing, the climbing of suo exhibits properties of a biclausal configuration. I conclude that clitic climbing crosslinguistically is not necessarily associated with restructuring effects and argue that the facts of climbing of suo is best captured by a head movement approach to clitic placement first advocated by Kayne (Null subjects and clitic climbing, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989b, Linguistic Inquiry 22: 647–686, 1991).