THE ROLE OF CLITIC DOUBLING IN THE INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF THE ALBANIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

This paper attempts to argue whether the repetition of the object or clitic doubling as a syntactic mechanism affects the encoding of the information structure in the Albanian language. In three previous studies by Kallulli (2000, 2008); Kapia (2010), it is reported that direct object clitic doubling is not an optional phenomenon in the Albanian language, that direct object clitic doubling systematically produces and encodes the information structure, and that clitic doubled objects are interpreted as topics. Thus, the object and the clitic have the status of topic in the sentence, as doubling occurs when the clitic refers to the already present discourse referent. That is, the NP is previously introduced in the discourse, thus becoming a specific referent available to be later selected via the doubling mechanism. In addition, according to them, when the object bears the topic feature, the direct object doubling is obligatory. Unlike Kallulli (2000, 2008) and Kapia (2010, 2012), Buchholz & Fiedler (1987) draw different conclusions, according to which the direct object clitic doubling in the Albanian language may be optional if the word order is canonical (SVO). This paper, on the other hand, aims at proving whether the object clitic doubling in our corpus marks the information structure by giving the feature [+ topic] or [-focus].