ON THE OPTIONAL AND OBLIGATORY REALIZATION OF THE BULGARIAN DIRECT OBJECT CLITIC Topic Agreement Marker and Default Pronoun - A Formal Account

This paper provides an Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) account of the Bulgarian direct object clitic's interaction with information structure (i.e. topic-focus structure) and word order. I show that the direct object clitic has at least two functions (it is both a topical object agreement marker and default pronoun), which are licensed by different environments. The analysis presented accounts for the distribution of the two different functions of the direct object clitic by means of general principles of LFG (i.e. Uniqueness, Completeness, Extended Coherence). Unlike in most – if not all – existing formal accounts (e.g. Rudin 1997, Avgustinova 1997), this analysis predicts when overt realization of the direct object clitic is possible and when it is obligatory. In order to achieve this, I allow for two different ways to identify a topical object. A topical object can either be realized in grammaticalized TOPIC-position, in which case it the has to be doubled, or remain in its default position and optionally be doubled. Which of the two strategies is chosen depends on the discourse situation. The proposed analysis is based on extensive evidence (an online experiment, as well as the data provided by Leafgren 1997a,b, 1998, and Avgustinova 1997), and incorporates recent findings on the discourse-configurationality of the left periphery in Bulgarian clauses (Rudin 1997, Arnaudova 2001, Dimitrova-Vulchanova & Hellan 1998). While covering a much broader range of data from spoken Bulgarian than previous formal accounts, the analysis makes the right predictions about possible word orders and the optional, or obligatory presence/absence of the direct object clitic. Furthermore, the analysis does not rely on the assumption of configurationality, which has been shown to be problematic for Bulgarian (Gerassimova & Jaeger 2002).