Open AccessSaliency and contrast in colloquial Bulgarian: clitic left dislocation versus contrastive topicalization
Author(s) -
Olga Arnaudova
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.35.2004.220
Subject(s) - clitic , topicalization , focus (optics) , bulgarian , linguistics , contrastive analysis , element (criminal law) , feature (linguistics) , contrast (vision) , argument (complex analysis) , computer science , political science , philosophy , artificial intelligence , physics , law , biochemistry , chemistry , optics
The claim advanced in this paper is that the presence of a left-dislocated element together with a resumptive clitic in Bulgarian is a special case of argument saturation with implications for the focus structure of the clause, while contrast involves discontinuous focus (contrastive topics/foci) with no clitics present in the derivation. Contrastive topic/focus constructions in Bulgarian can be united on the view that they involve (sets of) ordered pairs where the higher element is valuing a contrastive feature (cf. OCC in Chomsky 2001) while the element in the VP is a non-contrastive topic or focus. The contrastive feature participates in wh-structures but not in clitic-left-dislocated structures where pairing between arguments is 'accidental'.