8. Clitic doubling, agreement and information structure: The case of Albanian

Starting from the basic facts presented in Kallulli (2000) on clitic doubling in Albanian, the goals of the present paper are threefold: first, to provide additional arguments in favour of the view that clitic doubled direct object expressions are necessarily interpreted as topical (as opposed to focal) and that topichood – and more generally, information structure – is encoded in narrow syntax; secondly, to explain how several potentially problematic phenomena under this view, such as (apparent) clitic doubling of D-linked wh-phrases and certain asymmetries in the distribution of doubling clitics in restrictive relative clauses, can be solved without giving up the core idea that clitic doubling triggers a topical interpretation of the doublee; and thirdly, to provide a formal and uniform account of all patterns of clitic doubling found in Albanian.