| ROA: | 165 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Clitics, verb (non)-movement, and optimality in Bulgarian |
| Authors: | Geraldine Legendre |
| Comment: | 27 pages + title & abstract |
| Length: | 27 |
| Abstract: | This paper addresses the issue of whether functional categories head separate projections. In particular, Pollock (1989) claims that auxiliaries head functional projections. I argue here that Bulgarian clitic auxiliaries do not head separate syntactic projections. I further argue that the respective order of Bulgarian clitics and verbs is not the result of syntactic movement (e.g. Long Head Movement; Rivero, 1994). Nor does it result from a post-syntactic re-ordering at PF (e.g. Prosodic Inversion; Halpern, 1995). I develop an alternative analysis that makes syntactic movement or PF re-ordering completely unnecessary. The new analysis is couched in Optimality Theoretic terms and builds on the non-syntactic view of clitics advocated by Klavans (1985) and Anderson (1992). The analysis incorporates linear order constraints proposed in Prince and Smolensky (1993) and Anderson (1995); It demonstrates how the simple OT mechanism of ranking violable constraints can yield the complex distribution of the interrogative particle li with a minimum number of (independently needed) assumptions. The Optimality Theoretic account is parsimonious in that it posits minimal trees, minimal movement, and global evaluations of syntactic/PF structures. The constraints that do most of the work are interface constraints (many of which are independently needed in more traditional syntactic accounts). To the extent that this parsimonious analysis is successful at handling the facts previously accounted for in terms of extended trees, it provides one substantial argument against the Pollockian view that functional categories always head syntactic projections. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |