Objektklitika im Bulgarischen (review)

Like the contemporary Romance languages, Modern Bulgarian exhibits direct- and indirect-object clitic pronouns. According to Werkmann, these pronouns generally occur as proclitic objects of a finite verb, although, for purely phonological reasons, they may also appear as enclitics when the verb occurs sentence-initially. Working mostly within the framework of Chomskyan minimalist theory, W attributes the switch from proclisis to enclisis to a ‘last resort’ operation necessitated by the fact that the Bulgarian pronouns are indeed morphologically proclitic, but phonologically enclitic, that is, they require ‘a phonological word as [their] left neighbor, with which they form a phonological unit’ (272; translation mine—GHT).

Written in German, W’s work is the corrected and revised version of a dissertation she presented to the Philological Faculty at the University of Leipzig in May 2001. It consists of four chapters, only the last two of which (137–291) deal directly with the topic conveyed by the book’s title, ‘Object clitics in Bulgarian’ (Ch. 4 being a three-page summary of Ch. 3). Ch. 1, ‘Syntaktische Struktur des bulgarischen Satzes’ (13–98), defines the structure of the Bulgarian simple sentence in minimalist terms. Ch. 2, ‘Informationsstruktur bulgarischer Sätze’ (99–136), sets forth W’s views of two basic discourse functions expressed in terms of an opposition between topic and comment (in more traditional terms, theme and rheme) on the one hand, and an opposition between background and focus on the other. Together, these two chapters establish the framework for W’s generative analysis of object clitics in Ch. 3 (‘Bulgarische Objektklitika und ihre generative Analyse’, 137–288).

W notes that ‘in canonical Minimalist theory, movement operations that do not stem from morphosyntactic feature checking are either omitted from consideration or subjected to little investigation’ (101; translation mine—GHT). Because Bulgarian is characterized by relatively free word order, an adequate description of the word order in any given sentence can be achieved only through the consideration of additional, discourse-related functions. For this reason, W provides a detailed theoretical basis for ‘information structuring’ in the generation of Bulgarian sentences. Although the concepts topic and background (or, alternately, comment and focus) might appear at first to be synonymous, and indeed often overlap in practice, W is careful to clarify the difference. Her explanations and illustrations of sentence constituents corresponding in practice to each of these concepts (discourse functions) are generally comprehensible and persuasive.

To arrive at her conclusions, W engages in lengthy theoretical hand-wringing (176–215). Though admirable in detail, this tends to belie her ascription of ‘greater systematicity, explicitness of description, and explanatory force’ (176; translation mine—GHT) to generative linguistic analyses of Bulgarian object clitics as opposed to more traditional, structural-descriptive ones (which W succinctly presents in the span of some thirteen pages, 162–76). Among her conclusions is the very significant finding that Bulgarian ‘clitic doubling’ (also known as ‘object reduplication’) fulfills two important and related functions: as case markers and as markers of the discourse feature [–focus] (290).

W’s book is written with precision in a clear and concise manner. Slavic and general linguists—even those unfamiliar with minimalism or other generative linguistic theories—will find this book to be both informative and instructive.