Abstract
This paper compares the evolution of clitic placement in verbal complexes in Spanish and French. It is interesting to note that in Classical French (as throughout the whole history of Spanish) clitic climbing was possible in sentences like je le peux faire, whereas in Modern French it is not. We therefore hypothesize that an important change in the interpretation of the structure of verbal complexes has occurred. This change might have caused clitic climbing to become a stylistically, socially and geographically marked variant in French. To prove this theory, we have observed various recommendations of French and Spanish grammarians and have analyzed the production of 63 idiolects (31 in French and 32 in Spanish) between 1550 and 1950. Our corpus indicates that, unlike in French, clitic climbing has never been a marked variant in Spanish.