“Clitic climbing” in Hittite

Abstract

Cross-linguistically, clitic climbing occurs when clitics that belong syntactically and semantically to the subordinate clause (most commonly non-finite, rarely finite) appear in the main clause, i.e., they climb out of the subordinate clause into the main clause. In Hittite, prototypical clitic climbing is attested in two constructions: with non-finite predicates and finite restructuring verbs (Lyutikova & Sideltsev 2021b); and in serial constructions with the finite motion verbs pai- ‘go’ and uwa- ‘come’ co-occurring with another finite verb in the same clause (Koller 2013). In both of these cases, clitics climb out of complements of finite verbs. This paper explores yet another potentially relevant context for clitic climbing, a particular type of complex sentence that may be called ‘mismatch sentences’ (Sideltsev 2023). These involve three structurally distinct types of complex sentences which share one common property: they all have the same surface structure (1a) one word of the main clause (2) subordinate clause (1b) rest of the main clause. The enclitics of the subordinate clause are in (1a), so that they appear to climb out of the subordinate into the main clause. The enclitics of the main clause are consistently in the rest of the main clause (1b), never attached to the first word of the main clause (1a). Structurally, all these subordinate clauses adjoin to the main clause. This distribution of clitics is attested only if there is a one-word constituent in the main clause to the left of the subordinate clause. As movement out of adjoined clauses is held to be illicit in current linguistic theory, it is argued that, differently from prototypical clitic climbing, this is a purely post-syntactic reordering and does not involve any kind of syntactic movement of clitics out of the subordinate into the main clause: the structure one-word constituent of main clause—subordinate clause—main clause is always prosodically realized at the post-syntactic stage as subordinate clause—main clause.