Clitic climbing in the speech of Braga and Lisbon

Abstract

In European Portuguese, clitic pronouns can be attached to the highest verb in certain verbal clusters, a process known as clitic climbing (CC). According to some authors (Magro, 2005), CC is more productive in the Northern varieties of European Portuguese. In this chapter, we present and discuss the findings of a comparative analysis of Braga and Lisbon oral speech. Our main claim is that CC is a stable variation phenomenon. By means of a multivariate analysis, we show that CC is more frequent than attachment of the clitic to the infinitive in the two varieties. Moreover, we discuss evidence in favor of the claim that this syntactic variation presents the same configuration in both varieties: it is lexically constrained and not socially marked.