L'auxiliation en Italien

This article is based on the results of a study dealing with the various classes of Italian verbs (modals, aspectuels, verbs of movement, progressives, avere da + infinitive) that attract the clitic pronouns from their base position. Their "climbing" is accounted for by excluding any sentence boundary in the domain of the clitic movement. Since this is exactly the traditional structure of the verb-auxiliary relationship, the following hypothesis is made: the verb phrases of a single sentence comprise, in addition to the main verb, an indefinite number of complementary verbs (the ones listed above plus the temporal/aspectual and passive auxiliaries). As a result, their distribution becomes unpredictable and is complicated further by the possible reiteration of certain verbs in the phrase. An account for this on the basis of structural rules is thus quite difficult. Therefore, it is proposed that the complementary verbs are freely generated in the base through a recurrent rule associated with some strategies of meaning interpretation.