Open AccessOn the Diachrony of the Clitic Cluster in Bulgarian
Author(s) -
T. Dimitrova
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
ca' foscari japanese studies. religion and thought/ca' foscari japanese studies. religion and thought
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2610-900X
pISSN - 2610-9417
DOI - 10.30687/bes/0/2021/01/003
Subject(s) - clitic , bulgarian , linguistics , pronoun , cluster (spacecraft) , set (abstract data type) , history , slavic languages , layer (electronics) , computer science , philosophy , chemistry , programming language , organic chemistry
The article traces back the formation of the clitic cluster in Bulgarian starting from the Old Church Slavonic through Middle Bulgarian up to the Early Modern Bulgarian and beyond. It offers a hypothetical two-layer structure of the cluster – with the main layer consisting of a (pronominal) core and a (verbal) periphery, and a secondary layer hosting (‘quasi-clitical’) elements that exhibit, both diachronically and synchronically, a behaviour that is not strictly consistent with that of the clitical elements. The language material from three corpora shows that there was no change in the positions of the elements in the core, and the changes in the periphery observed are mainly due to the changes in the set of the elements (as a result of the restructuring of the pronoun system and changes in the auxiliary system, as well as the loss of some early clitics, such as the discourse markers).