Focus and Bulgarian Clause Structure: Word Order Variation and Prosody

The main claim made in this book, which is a reprint of Arnaudova's 2003 dissertation, is that word order variation in contemporary Bulgarian represents a predictable interaction between formal properties of the syntactic derivation and topic-focus/theme-rheme semantic relations. Traditionally, information structure and focus have been viewed as having a natural place in studies on Bulgarian syntax. Conversely, in generative studies, focus was considered until recently to be in the realm of pragmatics and only occasionally were its interactions with clause structure examined. A variety of constructions in contemporary Bulgarian, such as focalization, prosodically motivated movements, and, finally, base-generated clitic left dislocations are demonstrated in this study to be conditioned by two components of the grammar: the first rooted in the computational system, the second based on the interaction between intonation and semantic focus-topic properties.