Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

In this talk I survey the nature of single accusative clitics and clitic doubling of accusative objects in both adult and child grammar based on the study of Bulgarian. Cross-linguistic parallels are drawn to some of the Romance and Balkan Sprachbund languages, where appropriate.

Acquisition data from three original experimental studies with 79 typically-developing monolingual Bulgarian children aged 2;2-4;3 are reported. The experiments tested the production and placement principles of direct object clitics in child grammar as well as the comprehension of one specific environment of clitic doubling of direct objects, in which the doubling clitic is the only means of marking the object. This is the first study of the placement properties of object clitics in both pre- and post-verbal positions, and of the acquisition of clitic doubling for child Bulgarian.

Some of the main issues I will touch upon are: The nature of pronominal clitics as arguments or agreement; Triggers of clitic doubling environments; Early production of clitics under the predictions made by the Unique Checking Constraint (Wexler 1998); Early morphosyntax; Early clitic placement and implications for the analysis of clitic placement cross-linguistically; The nature of single and double cliticization as two distinctly presented phenomena at the interfaces. -