Clitic Placement, Prosody, and the Bulgarian Verbal Complex

Abstract

This paper compares competing ways of understanding the fact that clitics but nothing else freely and necessarily intervene between the two verbal heads in Bulgarian compound tenses of the type [participle + (clitics +) auxiliary]. These involve a participle fronted for focus reasons. The problem is then how the clitics get in the middle. I argue that prosodic and morphological approaches are not adequate, nor is any PF-filtering necessitated. Instead, the complex head structure [[participle + clitics] + [auxiliary]] must be created syntactically, with the participle adjoining to the clitics before the resulting complex adjoins to the auxiliary.

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