9. Clitic reduplication constructions in Bulgarian

2007

Journal of Linguistics 38(1). 174–176.

The Syntax of Romanian Clitics, 2019

This paper presents a syntactic account of Romanian clitic doubling and clitic clusters. It is shown that depending on feature specification of the argument, the direct object marker pe can behave either as a preposition or a case marker. If it is a preposition, the NP must be doubled by a clitic in order to satisfy the argument structure of the verb. If it is a case marker to the NP, the latter absorbs the case of the verb and satisfies its argument structure as well, hence precluding clitic doubling. As for clitic clusters, a sequence of two clitics must be compounded to form a new edge-bound element that can move under the OCP, without overloading the derivation. There are three types of compound rules, each of which operates in tandem with a series of phonological rules that alter their shapes. Ultimately these sandhi rules obliterate the boundary between the clitics, yielding a new word-like element. This fine-grained account, which relies heavily on grammatical features such as case, reference, π (tier-bound), ω (vector), and ψ (a series of traits like animate, definite, specific), runs like a clockwork. It makes it possible to predict all known peculiarities of clitic combinations, including the rigid dative-accusative ordering, the special behavior of the third feminine singular clitic, the lack of PCC effect, etc.

This paper provides an LFG account of the Bulgarian direct object clitic's interaction with information structure (i.e. topic-focus structure) and word order. We show that the direct object clitic has at least two functions (it is both a topical object agreement marker and default pronoun) and then demonstrate how our account correctly predicts in which syntactic environment which of the two functions can be chosen. In order to achieve this we allow for two different ways to identify a 'topic' in LFG – a move, which reduces the necessary claims about the direct object clitic's behaviour to the most general principles of LFG (i.e. Uniqueness, Completeness, Extended Coherence). The proposed analysis is based on extensive evidence (our own online experiment, Leafgren 1997a,b, 1998, and Avgustinova 1997), and incorporates recent findings on the discourse-configurationality of the left periphery in Bulgarian clauses (cf. Rudin 1997, Arnaudova 2001, Dimitrova-Vulchanova & Hellan 1998). Although covering a much broader range of data from spoken Bulgarian than other formal accounts, our account makes the right predictions about possible word orders and the optional, or obligatory presence/absence of the direct object clitic. Unlike almost all other recent accounts, our analysis does not rely on the assumption of configurationality, which has been shown to be problematic for Bulgarian (cf. Gerassimova & Jaeger 2002).

This paper analyses the placement of clitics that occupy the so-called "second" position in Serbian, in which both the first word or the first constituent can serve as host positions for clitics. In both corpus investigations and experimental research, we found that in Serbian there is more than one type of first position, both in the case of first word, and in the case of first constituent. Moreover, we found two types of cases depending on whether the sentence initial element is, or belongs to, either an argument or the predicate, yielding a four part classification. The experiments clearly establish preferred clitic placement in the two types of sentences. All four types are represented both in the investigated corpora and in the production and perception patterns, albeit in very different proportions. We attribute these differences to different discourse conditions between the first word and first phrase positions within each category.

Probus, 2007

The claim advanced in this paper is that the presence of a left-dislocated element together with a resumptive clitic in Bulgarian is a special case of argument saturation with implications for the focus structure of the clause, while contrast involves discontinuous focus (contrastive topics/foci) with no clitics present in the derivation. Contrastive topic/focus constructions in Bulgarian can be united on the view that they involve (sets of) ordered pairs where the higher element is valuing a contrastive feature (cf. OCC in Chomsky 2001) while the element in the VP is a non-contrastive topic or focus. The contrastive feature participates in wh-structures but not in clitic-left-dislocated structures where pairing between arguments is 'accidental'.

2017

Presentative constructions in Serbian allow two patterns [presentative particle NP GEN ] and [pre-sentative particle CL i NP iNOM ]. This paper proposes derivations of these patterns. The premise is that the choice between the two patterns is determined by the the type of inert v 0. Namely, the first pattern is derived if inert v 0 can assign partitive case, i.e. v 0 [ PART ] , while the latter pattern is derived if v 0 cannot assign partitive case. A special focus is put on the [CL i +NP i ] pattern since it represents a case of the co-occurrence of a pronominal clitic and a co-indexed NP, which is not characteristic of Serbian. It is argued that the relationship between the NP and the co-indexed clitic is that of agreement. The X 0 and the NP establish a relationship in which X 0 assigns nominative case to the NP and the NP values X 0 's [uφ:]. This agreement is taken to be the same kind of agreement that holds between an NP NOM and the X 0 which is in charge of agreement with participles in Serbian. The only twist in presentative constructions is the absence of a verb in the numeration. This means that the φ-features checked in X 0 cannot be pronounced as an integral part of a participle. Allowing certain morpho-phonological rules to pronounce boundless of features as various morphemes, it is proposed that the clitic is a spell-out of this bundle of features, resulting in the [CL i +NP i ] pattern.