Word order in Topic-Focus structures in the Balkan languages

The paper examines the word order patterns of Balkan languages with respect to the representation of the discourse categories of Topic and Focus in the Left Periphery of the Balkan clause. It is argued that Balkan languages share a number of syntactic properties relevant to the discourse organization of their embeddded clauses, and it is claimed that such discourse similarities must have been favored by multi-linguistic speakers in contact situations, in particular those that led to the establishment of the Balkan Srachbund

La modificazione frasale del nome in bulgaro

This paper discusses the so-called finite “clausal complements” of Ns in Bulgarian (e.g., novinata, če e živ ‘the news that he is alive’), introduced by a conjunction typically used for clausal complements of Vs. Building up on work by Stowell (1981) and Grimshaw (1990), it is argued, in the first part of the paper, that such nominal expansions are in fact modifiers of the noun, rather than its complements. In the second part of the paper, it is suggested that such clausal modifiers can be analyzed at the underlying level as non-restrictive relative clauses whose relative part gets subsequently reduced at the surface level of syntax

Ancora sul raddoppiamento dell'oggetto in bulgaro

The paper discusses the reduplication of direct and indirect objects with a clitic pronoun in modern Bulgarian. It is argued that the so-called Clitic Doubling, as traditional grammar labels it, is not a unitary phenomenon. Instead, there exist 5 different constructions with well-defined syntactic and pragmatic properties: (1) as for Topic; (2) Hanging Topic o Nominativus pendens; (2) Clitic Left Dislocation; (4) Clitic Right Dislocation, and (5) Clitic Doubling proper. These constructions need to be carefully distinguished in order to be able to better understand the very nature of the reduplication phenomena in Bulgarian, as well as in the other languages which possess the same or similar types of structures

DP and CP: a Relativized Minimality approach to one of their non parallelisms

Despite certain parallelisms, DPs and CPs also reveal profound differences. Here, we focus on one crucial difference between them: the one concerning extraction. In many languages extraction from (complement) DPs is more severely constrained than extraction from (complement) CPs (as we show on the basis of Italian and Bulgarian, in particular). We derive this difference from a difference in the internal make-up of DPs and CPs in interaction with Phase Theory and a version of Rizzi's (2013) Relativized Minimality which partly modifies Krapova and Cinque's (2008) specific implementation to deal with multiple wh-fronting in languages like Bulgarian

Two Asymmetries between Clitic Left and Clitic Right Dislocation in Bulgarian

The paper discusses some subtle points of the syntax of clitic left dislocation and clitic right dislocation in Bulgarian

On the syntax of possession in the Balkan languages:the elusive nature of the External Possessive construction

The paper discusses the so-called "external possession" construction as attested in the Balkan languages. Certain aspects of its syntax, semantics and the differences of its realization across the Balkans are investigated, and it is argued that from a typological point of view, Balkan external possession deviates from the European prototype in terms of constitutive properties and distribution of the construction

Word order in Topic-Focus structures in the Balkan languages

The paper examines the word order patterns of Balkan languages with respect to the representation of the discourse categories of Topic and Focus in the Left Periphery of the Balkan clause. It is argued that Balkan languages share a number of syntactic properties relevant to the discourse organization of their embeddded clauses, and it is claimed that such discourse similarities must have been favored by multi-linguistic speakers in contact situations, in particular those that led to the establishment of the Balkan Srachbund