Clitic Movement in Pregroup Grammar: A Cross-Linguistic Approach

The calculus of pregroups is a kind of type (or categorial) grammar introduced by Lambek [17] for the analysis and computation of natural languages; it has been applied to a wide range of languages from English and German, to French and Italian, and many others [11]. Like Lambek's Syntactic Calculus, pregroups are non-commutative structures, but the syntax of natural languages shows also the presence of cyclic patterns, in particular those exhibited by the phenomenon known in the literature as movement of clitic pronouns in different languages. In this paper we propose an extension of the calculus of pregroups including two cyclic rules and use them to formally analyze movement of clitic clusters in Persian, French, and Italian. In the final part of the paper, we discuss the relations of these rules to Yetter's and Abrusci's cyclic rules for Linear Logic.