There is no need to climb!

Abstract

This paper explores the correlation between clitic climbing and restructuring. In particular, it offers evidence from Catalan and cross-linguistic data to demonstrate that restructuring is universal and that clitic climbing is a facultative epiphenomenon of restructuring. In this sense, the proposal presented here claims that restructuring verbs select an embedded clause headed by a Cdef/Tdef. It also shows that languages triggering clitic climbing display a higher degree of transparency and that the (un)availability of clitic climbing in a particular language is derived by the nature of the embedded v.