Clitic Doubling

Abstract

Abstract This chapter deals with clitic doubling in Mac and Bg. It should be of broader significance because, among other things, clitic doubling is not associated with a preposition in SI, as it is in the Romance languages, and because it has become grammaticalized as an obligatory marker of specificity in Mac. There are two classes of questions concerning clitic doubling in Mac and Bg. The first is when it occurs; that is, what semantic and discourse factors license clitic doubling. This question is of particular concern in these and other Balkan languages in which not all objects and indirect objects are doubled. The second question is how clitic doubling can be analyzed syntactically; that is, how both the clitic and the doubled argument can be assigned a theta-role. These questions can be, and often are, addressed separately because a given set of semantic and discourse lincensors of clitic doubling may be compatible with a number of syntactic analyses and vice versa. Note that there is a large literature on clitic doubling; of primary relevance to us is that on the Balkan languages because clitic doubling in Greek (Anagnostopoulou 1994; Schneider-Zioga 1994; Anagnostopoulou and Giannakidou 1995), Romanian (Dobrovie-Sorin 1990), and Albanian {Kallulli 1995) is similar to clitic doubling in Mac and Bg (Rudin 1996, 1997; Dimitrova-Vulchanova and Hellan 1991, 1996; Alexandrova 1997; Guentcheva 1994).