Pragmatics, word order and cross-reference

There is an apparent ambivalence in the lexico-grammatical status of pronominal clitics in Bulgarian. They have the features of pronominal forms on the one hand and grammaticalized markers on the other. The present analysis builds on my previous publications in the field of Bulgarian clitics, sentence pragmatics and word order, but it also takes into account other recent publications on the subject. I adopt the view that Bulgarian pronominal clitics have grammaticalized to a degree where they function as cross-reference markers of the object, identical with verbal inflexions which cross-reference the subject. This approach makes it possible to account for the use of clitics both in their object-reduplicating function and as separate short pronominal forms. In correlation with prosody and special sentence positions, clitics play an important role in the pragmatic organization of the expression as markers of object topicalization. Basing my pragmatic analysis on the general schema of pragmatic positions in the Bulgarian sentence (cf. Stanchev 1997), in this article I present an outline of the major patterns of Topic and Focus assignment involving constructions with reduplicating clitics (CRCs).