The South Slavic Pronominal Clitics

Abstract

Abstract. The paper highlights several prominent aspects of pronominal clitics in Balkan Slavic. The author posits a common South-Slavic underlying structure, in which the pronominal clitics are derived in head-positions of KP phrases, from where they move to the second-position clitic-cluster. In Macedonian and Bulgarian, the KPs are subsequently replaced by DPs and the pronominal clitics come to be generated as heads of AgrO and AgrIO. In clitic-doubling structures, they check the features of the XP*s with which they associate, the checking being done by raising the XPs to the specifiers of the phrases projected by the clitics. While in most European languages the pronominal clitics occur in either second or pre-verbal position, the Macedonian pronominal clitics occur in either, the type of clitichood following from the morphological features of the head of the clause. In imperative clauses, the pronominal clitics of all the South Slavic languages are, however, enclitic. The fact that the behavior of the Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian pronominal clitics does not change when the mood of the clause is changed can be explained through the assumption that Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian have weak Mood operators--whatever rules apply for the derivation of indicative clauses with clitics also apply for the derivation of imperative clauses with clitics. The behavior of the Macedonian and Bulgarian pronominal clitics in negative imperative clauses can also be explained through the strength of an operator--the Neg operator. The position of the Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian negation operator relative to the verb and the pronominal clitics can, however, be accounted for if one assumes that the phonologically deficient negation operator and the verb form a negative verb in the lexicon. ********** 1. From Second-Position to Pre-Verbal Clitics In South Slavic, two major types of clausal pronominal clitics (dative and accusative) have been identified: pre-verbal and second position ones. Both types of pronominal clitics occur in clusters, which, depending on the language and type of clause, may also include auxiliary clitics, modal clitics, interrogative clitics and negation clitics. The major difference between the (clusters of) clitics of the two types--the one to which they owe their names--is their distinct placement in the clause: while pre-verbal clitics are placed to the immediate left of V, whether tensed or non-tensed, second-position clitics are placed to the right of an clausal element. (1) For most analysts (e.g., Dimitrova-Vulchanova 1995; Franks 1998, 2000; Franks and Progovac 1994; Progovac 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000; Rivero 1997; Roberts 1994; Tomic 1996; Wilder and Cavar 1994a, 1994b) the initial element is a CP-initial word or phrase, if a CP is projected, or an IP-initial word or phrase, if no CP is projected. Radanovic-Kocic (1996) and Boskovic (2000, 2001), however, argue that it is an word or phrase after an intonation boundary. (2) The syntactic hosting of the clitics does not always go hand in hand with their phonological hosting. In particular, Bulgarian clitics are syntactically pre-verbal, but phonologically they are predominately enclitic. (3) As a result of this discrepancy between syntactic and phonological orientation, the Bulgarian clitics share a restriction with the second-position clitics--they cannot appear first in the clause. (4) While Boskovic (2001) maintains that the pronominal clitics of all the South Slavic languages originate in agreement phrases, I argue that only the pronominal clitics of the clitic-doubling South Slavic languages are derived there. (5) In Serbo-Croatian (6) and Slovenian, the dative and accusative pronominal clitics are derived as K (case) heads of KPs in argument positions and, on their way to wherever the second-position clitic cluster is formed, they move to AgrIO and AgrO, respectively, to check their agreement features. …

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