Abstract
True clitic doubling involves multiple expression of a single argument in different structural positions. In clitic doubling configurations of this kind, a clitic expresses features of its full nominal phrase associate in argument position. True clitic doubling has traditionally been argued to arise via agreement, so that the clitic is the manifestation of an agreement relation between a verb and the associate. However, another possibility exists: the clitic could be a (pro)nominal element related to the associate via movement; then, clitic doubling involves the simultaneous realization of both the head and the foot of a movement chain. Here, I argue for the latter analysis, showing that true clitic doubling, at least in Bulgarian, has the properties of movement—i.e., it does not involve agreement, as is standardly assumed for this language. I provide support for this claim by considering a number of diagnostics which distinguish between clitics that reflect agreement processes and clitics that do not. Specifically, I argue that the clitic is a reduced articulation of the higher occurrence of a raised object. Thus, the proposed analysis treats clitic doubling as an interface phenomenon which results from the interaction of two independently motivated operations of the syntactic and morphophonological components of grammar: A-movement and morphological merger.
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