Thematic Intonation Patterns in Bulgarian Clitic Replication

The phenomenon of clitic replication in Bulgarian involves two linguistic entities: a full-fledged nominal constituent in a particular syntactic function and a co-referent weak pronominal form corresponding to the particular syntactic function. In this paper we present experimental results which support our hypothesis that the nominal material that is replicated by a pronominal clitic in Bulgarian utterances consistently exhibits thematic intonational properties. 1. WORD ORDER TYPES AND INFORMATION STRUCTURE Let us first introduce some background ideas and terminology concerning word order and information structure. In languages where the word order is discourse-conditioned and reflects to a considerable extent the information structure of utterances, i.e. the so-called free word order languages, a general (and fairly universal) distinction can be made between objective and subjective alignment. Presented in terms of the traditional theme-rheme partitioning of the sentence, an objective alignment (OA) would presuppose that thematic parts of the utterance linearly precede the rhematic ones, i.e. [theme +] < [rheme +] A subjective alignment (SA), in turn, amounts to a themepreceding-rheme linear order, i.e. [rheme +] < [theme +]. These two notions serve as basis for determining the communicatively unmarked and communicatively marked word order, respectively, depending on the utterance type. In particular, subjective alignment is considered unmarked for Bulgarian interrogative, imperative and exclamative utterances, with objective alignment pattern being the marked word-order variant. As for Bulgarian declarative utterances, communicatively unmarked word order conforms to the objective alignment, while the subjective one is communicatively marked. The importance of intonation for marked word orders in Bulgarian has already been observed by Ivanchev (cf. [8]). Since we need to distinguish in our study between two types of thematic information a more prominent discourseanchoring part and a rather backgrounding "explanatory" part, we shall adopt the terminology used in the Information Packaging approach by Engdahl and Vallduví ([6], [9]). The basic focus-ground articulation of the utterance is further refined by dividing the ground into link (what the focus is about) and tail (how the focus fits in the context). Interpreted in these terms, an objective alignment would amount to a link-precedingfocus order, i.e. GROUND (link) < FOCUS, and the focuspreceding-tail alignment, i.e. FOCUS < GROUND (tail), is to be considered as subjective. Linguistic resources relevant for the information structure (IS) of Bulgarian utterances involve: • word order, remarkably flexible and discourse conditioned, as in all Slavic languages; • morphological category of definiteness, unusual in the Slavic language family; • cliticisation, as in any language having a system of weak and strong forms of personal pronouns: entities that are fully recoverable from the context can be structured as insignificant for the current communication purpose by using a clitic, an informationally inert element occurring in the utterance for reasons of (morpho-)syntactic wellformedness; • clitic replication of nominal material, specific to Bulgarian; • intonation, fairly malleable, as in languages like English and unlike, e.g., Czech. From such a multidimensional perspective, Avgustinova models in [4] the IS of Bulgarian utterances as an interplay of three factors: the lexeme-specific obliqueness hierarchy of grammatical relations, the actually observable constituent order, and the contingent clitic replication. Our goal in this article is to consider the intonational manifestation of the IS within task-oriented dialogues. We will be especially concerned with the intonation contours observable with nominal material which has been replicated by a clitic pronoun. 2. CLITIC REPLICATION The grammatical process of manifesting as a clitic personal pronoun the INDEX (i.e. the person, number and gender) and the CASE (i.e. the syntactic function) of nominal material which is overtly realised in the same syntactic domain is referred to as clitic replication (CR). The phenomenon of CR involves two linguistic objects: • a full-fledged nominal constituent "base NP" in a particular syntactic function (direct object, indirect object, possessor), and • a co-referent weak pronominal form "replica" corresponding to this syntactic function (accusative clitic, dative clitic, possessive clitic). The "base NP" (i.e. the "original") and its pronominal clitic page 1501 ICPhS99 San Francisco "replica" are related to each other through their grammatical categories (in particular, through agreement-relevant features). Following [4], we distinguish two CR-relevant syntactic domains in Bulgarian the clause and the NP, as well as two types of CR anaphoric and cataphoric. Within the clause, both the direct and the indirect object NP are replicable by the corresponding dative or accusative verbal clitic (as illustrated in (1) and (3)), and in the syntactic domain of the NP, the possessor phrase can be replicated by a possessive clitic (as illustrated in (2) and (4). The CR is interpreted as anaphoric if the replicated nominal material linearly precedes the clitic within the relevant syntactic domain, as in (1) for the clause or (2) for the NP domain, and as cataphoric otherwise cf. (3) or (4), respectively. For convenience, the nominal material and the clitic replicating it are uniformly underlined in the examples. (1) Na nego programata mu ja pokazaxme nie. to him the-program DAT-3sg.m ACC-3sg.f showed we (~ 'It was us who showed him the program.') (2) Na Ivan sestra mu e studentka. of John sister POSS-3sg.m is student ('John's sister is a student.') (3) Nie mu ja pokazaxme na nego programata. we DAT-3sg.m ACC-3sg.f showed to him the-program ('We showed him the program.')) (4) Sestra mu Na Ivan e studentka. sister POSS-3sg.m of John is student ('John's sister is a student.') Even though the accusative CR in the syntactic domain of the clause may serve as a basic means for identification of the direct object when the verb inflection does not unambiguously reveal the subject, the dominant function of Bulgarian CR is object thematicisation (cf. [4] for details). Assuming that the nominal material that is replicated by a clitic pronoun belongs typically to a thematic (i.e. ground) part of the sentence, we could predict the intonation contour with it associated with the part of the utterance that is co-referent with the clitic pronoun. In our experiment, we have concentrated on this hypothesis. 3. MATERIAL A modified version of the Edinburgh Map Task [1] was carried out in the Sofia variety of Bulgarian. Ten speakers were involved in the experiment, and each speaker participated in two map tasks. We examined the intonation contours observable in map task data which contained anaphoric or cataphoric instances of CR. The analysis was carried out using waves(tm) in conjunction with the ”transcriber” script which is a part of the English ToBI [5]. The speech data was orthographically transcribed and intonationally labeled. 4. ACCENT PATTERNS The intonation contour associated with the replicated nominal material depends on how the latter is interpreted in the IS of the utterance. The observed regularities can be formulated with respect to the CR type: anaphoric CR implies link interpretation of the replicated nominal material, while cataphoric CR imposes tail interpretation on the replicated nominal material. The corresponding accent patterns can preliminarily be classified as in Figure 1. accent sentence type link associated tail associated focus associated declarative interrogative declarative focus interrogative focus