Word Order and Clitics in Bulgarian
Saarbrücken Dissertations in Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, Volume 5(Summary)
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Tania Avgustinova
This thesis is concerned with Bulgarian
word-order phenomena involving clitics. It grew out of an interest in
the way considerable word-order variance is achieved in a language
exhibiting an impoverished declension system in combination with a
well-developed mechanism for clitic replication. Across the languages,
clitics' behaviour varies from that of word affixes to the autonomy of
independent syntactic forms; in this respect, the intermediate status
of Bulgarian clitics is particularly interesting.
Even though the linguistic research carried
out in this work is strongly motivated by the need for an explicit
formal description of Bulgarian constituent structure and word order
for (the purposes of) computer implementation, the formal issues have
been moved to the second plan, with the intention of making the
analysis comprehensible for the broadest possible circles of readers
with a background in Slavistics. The lack of stress on formalisation,
however, does not imply that the theory presented cannot be formalised.
Quite the contrary, the fact that it has been successfully implemented
in the form of a parser underlying an experimental grammar-checker for
Bulgarian shows that a rigorous formalisation is indeed possible.
As theoretical framework, the Head-driven
Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is chosen in this thesis, due to its
essential property of offering a multidimensional, but nevertheless
integral, sign-based representation of linguistic objects. The
complexity of structural relations within the Bulgarian verb complex
questions the adequacy and universal validity of lexicalist approaches
to the treatment of clitics. It is argued in this work that
cliticisation in Bulgarian has a morphosyntactic dimension and that
verbal clitics belong to the verb-complex constituent regarded as an
intermediate construct between the lexical verb and the clause headed
by this verb. The proposed analysis is based on a variant of HPSG that
provides an additional morphosyntactic dimension for modelling analytic
verb morphology and cliticisation, and as a result, dustinguishes three
types of objects: lexical, morphosyntactic and syntactic. The concept
of morphosyntactic marking introduced in this work is central in the
treatment of Bulgarian analytic verb forms. Based on constituent
structure and syntactic behaviour, two main types of verb complexes are
distinguished: compact verb complexes characterised by strict adjacency
of their components, and composite verb complexes having two loosely
bound parts that need not stand adjacently. Formally, cliticisation is
considered a matter of morphosyntactic constituency rather than of
lexicon. The actual placement of verbal clitics and verbal clitic
sequences is interpreted on the level of verbal morphosyntax where
prosodic constraints are also taken into consideration. As a
consequence, pronominal clitics are not legitimate constituents on the
clausal level.
The approach to the constituent structure of
Bulgarian proposed in this study allows for an adequate representation
of the commonly admitted "two-faced" appearance of object clitics that
are neither real morphemes nor full-fledged syntactic constituents.
Intuitively, a certain parallelism exists between the relation of the
verb inflexion to the subject NP and the relation between a pronominal
clitic and the corresponding coreferential object NP. The information
about the person, number and gender (i.e. the index) of the
syntactically nominative subject NP is available in the morphology of
the verb. The same index information plus information about the
syntactic case of the respective full-fledged NP complement is supplied
by the pronominal clitics within the morphosyntactic verb complex.
Thus, both mechanisms - the morphological one of verb inflexion, and
the morphosyntactic one of object cliticising - deliver very similar
results on the clausal level amounting to syntactic optionality of
overt realisation for the respective full-fledged nominal constituents.
Once the step towards admitting the existence
of morphosyntactic constituency is made, the language description gains
in explanatory power and transparency with respect to a number of
phenomena belonging to the vague "interface" area between the lexicon
and syntax proper. The clearly defined morphosyntactic module in the
grammar of Bulgarian distinguishes this language in the Slavic family,
which illustrares that in HPSG the parametrisation of linguistic and
cross-linguistic variation can occur in the grammar. In this respect,
it might be relevant to investigate whether a morphosyntactic grammar
module would be justified and beneficial in the description of other
languages exhibiting phenomena that are problematic for the lexicalist
HPSG approach.
As a prerequisite for discussing the role of
clitic replication on the clausal level, a typology of Bulgarian
articled and non-articled NPs is developed, thus providing criteria for
determining the replication potential of nominal material. The main
claim is that what can be replicated by a clitic pronoun (under the
appropriate verb-lexeme specific or communicative conditions) is the
nominal material that is used as an identifying specific description of
a given object, while non-articled NPs that are categorising or
non-specific descriptions, as well as articled NPs that are generic or
non-specific descriptions completely lack replication potential.
A particular contribution of this thesis is
the view that clitic replication of full-fledged NP-complements has a
communicatively-driven syntactic dimension and deserves special
attention as a factor influencing the constituent order variation in
the Bulgarian sentence. In this respect, it is shown how the
(canonical) lexeme-specific obliqueness order of grammatical relations,
the concrete surface alignment and the contingent clitic replication
interact in the communicative structuring of utterances. It is further
argued that the phenomenon of clitic replication in Bulgarian has two
functions which interact to a different degree in each particular case:
direct-object identification by means of accusative clitics, and
thematicisation of nominal material by means of both accusative and
dative clitics. The accusative clitic replication in the S-V-O sentence
type, and the accusative and dative clitic replication in the S-V-O1-O2
sentence type are then modelled in their relation to the grammatical
obliqueness hierarchy (the canonical element order), the particular
surface alignment (fairly flexible in Bulgarian) and the information
structure (the communicative segmentation of the particular utterance)
with special attention to the emphatic-stress location. By use of the
proposed approach, it can be predicted when clitic replication is
impossible, when it is obligatory, and when it is only optional.
An important feature of the linguistic
analysis proposed in this thesis is its computational tractability. The
appendix contains an illustration of how the relevant linguistic
knowledge is organised in multiple-inheritance hierarchies, as well as
information on a fragment of computerised Bulgarian grammar which
covers the verbal morphosyntax in full range, and to a considerable
extent the replication phenomena on the clausal level.
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