A baseline for object clitic climbing in Italian

Despite a considerable amount of research dealing with the phenomenon of object clitic climbing (OCC) in Italian, some aspects of the phenomenon are largely understudied. These include the rate of occurrence of OCC and its variational spectrum (relating to questions such as where in the Italian-speaking areas OCC occurs to which extent, and whether its occurrence covaries with specific linguistic and sociolinguistic factors). Data from 310 respondents were elicited through an online questionnaire, centered on a production task, and analyzed statistically. The data show that (a) OCC is a minority phenomenon, used in only 13 % of cases in our sample; (b) linguistic variables have no predictive value, except for the variable of verb type for the cohorts of speakers born after 1975; by contrast, (c) sociolinguistic variables are predictive: age is the most predictive variable, with linguistic background (place of residence before age 14 and geographic area of the spoken Italo-Romance variety) also relevant.