litic Climbing and Null Subject Languages

The aim of this paper is to derive Clitic Climbing from restructuring together with the Null Subject property. Data are drawn mainly from Catalan. I propose a biclausal analysis for restructuring constructions in which clitic climbing (like any clitic-Argument dependencies) is analysed as an A-dependency, assuming that clitics are AGR-heads which check features in the Agreement-Case system. Clitic climbing would be then a «long distance» A-dependency, which is made possible by assuming that restructuring is always raising, and that raising in NSLs is a transparent structure for A-dependencies, due to the nature of Nominative Case checking in these languages. To this end, a reformulation of locality conditions for checking (Agree, Chomsky 1998) is needed, which has some independent plausibility.