Bulgarian Word Order and the Role of the Direct Object Clitic in LFG

This paper provides an LFG account of the Bulgarian direct object clitic's interaction with information structure (i.e. topic-focus structure) and word order. We show that the direct object clitic has at least two functions (it is both a topical object agreement marker and default pronoun) and then demonstrate how our account correctly predicts in which syntactic environment which of the two functions can be chosen. In order to achieve this we allow for two different ways to identify a 'topic' in LFG a move, which reduces the necessary claims about the direct object clitic's behaviour to the most general principles of LFG (i.e. Uniqueness, Completeness, Extended Coherence). The proposed analysis is based on extensive evidence (our own online experiment, Leafgren 1997a,b, 1998, and Avgustinova 1997), and incorporates recent findings on the discourse-configurationality of the left periphery in Bulgarian clauses (cf. Rudin 1997, Arnaudova 2001, Dimitrova-Vulchanova & Hellan 1998). Although covering a much broader range of data from spoken Bulgarian than other formal accounts, our account makes the right predictions about possible word orders and the optional, or obligatory presence/absence of the direct object clitic. Unlike almost all other recent accounts, our analysis does not rely on the assumption of configurationality, which has been shown to be problematic for Bulgarian (cf. Gerassimova & Jaeger 2002).