Evidential Mood, Restructuring, and the Distribution of Functional Sembrare

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the restrictions on clitic climbing with Italian sembrare. For some speakers sembrare may behave either as a lexical verb and resist clitic climbing, or as a restructuring verb, allowing clitic climbing (Cinque 1999, 2002, 2004). However, even for the latter speakers, clitic climbing is excluded with certain modal or aspectual auxiliaries, in conditional clauses and in the complements of factive verbs. I will provide evidence that ‘restructuring’ sembrare is inserted in the head encoding evidential mood (Cinque 2004). Speaker-related modal markers must be licensed by Force, in the left periphery. The left periphery of conditional clauses and of the complements of factive predicates lacks Force; as a result, speaker-oriented modal markers, among which evidential markers, are excluded, hence evidential sembrare cannot be licensed. The absence of Force in conditional clauses will be shown to follow from the movement analysis of such clauses.