Clitic Movement in Pregroup Grammar: A Cross-Linguistic Approach

Pregroups are mathematical structures introduced by the mathematician J. Lambek as an algebraic procedure for generating the syntax of natural languages; they have been applied to the grammatical analysis of a wide range of languages: from French and Italian, to Arabic, Persian and many more. Pregroups are non-commutative structures, but there are different kinds of movements in the syntax of natural languages, e.g. those caused by clitic pronouns. In this paper we introduce two meta-rules, derived from cyclic linear logic, and use them to formalize movement of clitic clusters in Persian, French, and Italian.