The Balkan clitic doubling and its possible Equivalent in German

One peculiarity of all Indo-European Balkan (Slavic and non-Slavic) languages is object reduplication or clitic doubling. Since the German language does not use reduplication of objects, the aim of this article is to examine the possible equivalent in German to Balkan clitic doubling After researching the literature, two applicants could be considered as potential equivalents: the pronoun es and scrambling. There are two reasons the pronoun es is under consideration: (i) the pronoun es participate in a kind of a duplication construction when used in so called correlate function, and (ii) reduplicated object clitics perform some functions as the expletive pronoun es does. Scrambling came to the attention because some linguists suppose that both object duplication and scrambling are driven by the same information structure mechanisms. This article shows that object reduplication clitics and the correlated pronoun es can be treated as an equivalent to each other but only peripherally, in a few specific uses. While regarding scrambling, in contrast to some linguists, it turned out that object duplication and scrambling have no common features and are not always driven by the same language mechanisms. Scrambling, compared to object reduplication clitics, is allowed even if the object is an existential noun phrase (without an article). Furthermore, there are indications, that scrambling does not always assign the feature [-focus] as claimed and is not always driven by information structure mechanisms as object duplication does.

Keywords:

Syntax, clitic doubling, Balkan languages, information structure scrambling,

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