Clitic Doubling of the Proposed Direct Object in Bulgarian
Clitic Doubling of the Proposed Direct Object in Bulgarian

Summary/Abstract: The presence or absence of accusative clitic doubling in Bulgarian clauses with direct object preposing serves grammatical or pragmatic purposes and falls within the discussion on word order, in particular the analysis of clauses exhibiting marked word order. Grammatical doubling occurs in clauses where the clitics are part of the verb’s morpho logical make-up and in clauses where the clitics serve as case markers for disambiguating the syntactic function of the initial noun phrase (NP). Pragmatic clitic doubling does not affect the clause grammaticality or in terms of semantics: it serves as a topicality marker, signaling the discourse-old status of the preposed NPs’ referents or is used to activate such referents. Pragmatic clitic doubling may occur with focused discourse-old NPs, which at first sight may appear as an inconsistency: one would expect that the topic and focus should be identified differently. In Bulgarian pragmatic accusative clitic doubling is not admissible only when the preposed NP realizes contrastive, emphatic focus.

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