When Restructuring and Clause Union Meet in Catalan and Beyond

Abstract

This paper considers what happens when clause union meets restructuring by examining contexts where the causative FACERE verb takes a restructuring verb as its complement in Catalan, in comparison with French and Italian. We show that in Catalan and Italian and to some degree also French, in such contexts, the case realisation of the causee as accusative/dative depends on the transitivity of the next clause down. We call this effect, first discussed by Burzio (1986) for Italian, ‘restructuring for transitivity’. We then move our attention to the interaction between restructuring for transitivity and other restructuring and clause union phenomena such as clitic climbing and se deletion, and discuss several theoretical challenges posed by these interactions.

Keywords

• causative constructions
• restructuring verbs
• clause union
• transitivity
• case alternations
• clitic climbing