Сравнение на прозодичните особености на клитичния комплекс в съобщителни и въпросителни изречения в българския език / A Comparison of the Prosodic Features of the Clitic Cluster in Bulgarian Declarative and Interrogative Sentences

This article provides a comparison between some cases of the realization of the cli-tic cluster (the short forms of the personal pronouns in the accusative and the dative case and the forms of the verb ‘to be’ in copulative sentences and sentences where ‘to be’ is used as an auxiliary verb) in wh-questions and declarative sentences. The main goal is to study the prosodic and intonational features of these sentences from a clitic cluster’s perspective. In order to achieve this, the author uses comparison and analysis of the structures and their tonic graphs. The study focuses on examples of double realization of interrogative markers (with the addition of the question particle li) in relation to the prosodic organization. Cases of negation (with the addition of the negation particle ne) are touched upon in brief. Keywords: prosody, intonation, prosodic organization, wh-questions, clitics, clitic clusters, negation

A distinctness approach to clitic combinations in Romance

This paper analyses the combinatorial restrictions that operate in clitic clusters in certain Eastern Iberian varieties (Aragonese, Spanish, and Catalan). In particular, I focus on the combination of third person clitics. As it is well known, in some Romance varieties the combination of a third person accusative clitic and a third person dative clitic is banned (the so-called ∗le lo restriction, Bonet, Eulàlia. 1991. Morphology after syntax: Pronominal clitics in Romance. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dissertation; Cuervo, María Cristina. 2013. Spanish clitic clusters: Three of a perfect pair. Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 2. 191–220; Nevins, Andrew. 2007. The representation of third person and its consequences for person-case effects. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 25(2). 273–313; Ordóñez, Francisco. 2002. Some clitic combinations in the syntax of Romance. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 1. 201–224, Ordóñez, Francisco. 2012. Clitics in Spanish. In José I. Hualde, Antxon Olarrea & Erin O’Rouke (eds.), The handbook of Spanish Linguistics, 423–453. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell; Perlmutter, David. 1971. Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston). In order to license this troublesome combination, languages resort to different ‘repair strategies’ modifying the structure of one of the merged clitics. In the literature on clitic combinations, there have been two main proposals of analysis: morphological and syntactical. In this paper, I put forward an analysis based on the Distinctness Condition (Hiraiwa, Ken. 2010. The syntactic OCP. In Yukio Otsu (ed.), The proceedings of the 11th Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, 35–56. Hituzi: Tokyo; Neeleman, Ad & Hans van de Koot. 2005. Syntactic haplology. In Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), The Blackwell companion to syntax, 685–710. Wiley-Blackwell; Perlmutter, David. 1971. Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston; Richards, Norvin. 2010. Uttering trees, vol. 56. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Van Riemsdijk, Henk. 1998. Categorial feature magnetism: The endocentricity and distribution of projections. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 2(1). 1–48; Yip, Moira. 1998. Identity avoxidance in phonology and morphology. In Steven G. Lapointe, Diane K. Brentari & Patrick M. Farell (eds.), Mophology and its relation to phonology and syntax, 216–246. Stanford, CA: CSLI). Specifically, I argue that the restrictions that constraint clitic combinations are due to the impossibility to linearize two identical syntactic objects, such as <XP, XP> (Chomsky, Noam. 2013. Problems of projection. Lingua 130. 33–49; Chomsky, Noam. 2015. Problems of projection. In Elisa Di Domenico, Cornelia Hamann & Simona Matteini (eds.), Structures, strategies and beyond: Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti, 1–16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Moro, Andrea. 2000. Dynamic antisymmetry (No. 38). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Richards, Norvin. 2010. Uttering trees, vol. 56. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). From this perspective, cross-linguistic variation is the result of different ‘repair strategies’ languages deploy to make <XP, XP> objects linearizable (Richards, Norvin. 2010. Uttering trees, vol. 56. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Clitics and Clitic Clusters in Morphology

Clitics can be defined as prosodically defective function words. They can belong to a number of syntactic categories, such as articles, pronouns, prepositions, complementizers, negative adverbs, or auxiliaries. They do not generally belong to open classes, like verbs, nouns, or adjectives. Their prosodically defective character is most often manifested by the absence of stress, which in turn correlates with vowel reduction in those languages that have it independently; sometimes the clitic can be just a consonant or a consonant cluster, with no vowel. This same prosodically defective character forces them to attach either to the word that follows them (proclisis) or to the word that precedes them (enclisis); in some cases they even appear inside a word (mesoclisis or endoclisis). The word to which a clitic attaches is called the host. In some languages (like some dialects of Italian or Catalan) enclitics can surface as stressed, but the presence of stress can be argued to be the result of assignment of stress to the host-clitic complex, not to the clitic itself. One consequence of clitics being prosodically defective is that they cannot be the sole element of an utterance, for instance as an answer to some question; they need to always appear with a host. A useful distinction is that between simple clitics and special clitics. Simple clitics often have a nonclitic variant and appear in the expected syntactic position for nonclitics of their syntactic category. Much more attention has been paid in the literature to special clitics. Special clitics appear in a designated position within the clause or within the noun phrase (or determiner phrase). In several languages certain clitics must appear in second position, within the clause, as in most South Slavic languages, or within the noun phrase, as in Kwakw'ala. The pronominal clitics of Romance languages or Greek must have the verb as a host and appear in a position different from the full noun phrase. A much debated question is whether the position of special clitics is the result of syntactic movement, or whether other factors, morphological or phonological, intervene as well or are the sole motivation for their position. Clitics can also cluster, with some languages allowing only sequences of two clitics, and other languages allowing longer sequences. Here one relevant question is what determines the order of the clitics, with the main avenues of analysis being approaches based on syntactic movement, approaches based on the types of morphosyntactic features each clitic has, and approaches based on templates. An additional issue concerning clitic clusters is the incompatibility between specific clitics when combined and the changes that this incompatibility can provoke in the form of one or more of the clitics. Combinations of identical or nearly identical clitics are often disallowed, and the constraint known as the Person-Case Constraint (PCC) disallows combinations of clitics with a first or second person accusative clitic (a direct object, DO, clitic) and a third person (and sometimes also first or second person) dative clitic (an indirect object, IO, clitic). In all these cases either one of the clitics surfaces with the form of another clitic or one of the clitics does not surface; sometimes there is no possible output. Here again both syntactic and morphological approaches have been proposed.

A crowdsourcing approach to the description of regional variation in French object clitic clusters

Our contribution is dedicated to the empirical testing of alleged regional variants of object clitic clusters in modern French in France, Belgium and Switzerland. We provide some intriguing new insights into the regional distribution of non-standard variants and discuss one hypothesis on their nature and two hypotheses to explain their coming into being: language-contact (with Francoprovençal, Occitan and Oïl dialects, H1) and/or analogical leveling (H2), on the one hand, and their postsyntactic, rather than syntactic, nature, on the other (H3). Our main results reveal that the three non-standard variants where order in object clitic clusters is concerned are not regionally well-distributed, i.e. the observed distribution does not correspond to any cohesive area. In contrast, only one variant where the selection of the form (me vs. moi) is at issue seems to be regionally confined: it is found in French-speaking Switzerland, in Gascony, plus some rare attestations of it in the North of France. All in all, variation in object clitic clusters indicates a genuinely new geographical articulation of regional French that does not coincide with traditional dialectal areas.

Impoverishment but only so far: Vernacular Catalan clitic clusters

This study investigates two apparently distinct morphological processes that occur in some specific Vernacular Central Catalan clitic clusters: Fission and Impoverishment. In Fission, a cluster of first and second person clitics (e. g.

The clitic binding restriction revisited: Evidence for antilogophoricity

In some Romance languages, including French and Spanish, there is an interesting asymmetry concerning the behavior of isolated clitics and clitic clusters with respect to coreference. In the French example