NonInitiality within Spell-Out Domains: Unifying the Post-Syntactic Behavior of Bulgarian Dative Clitics

Possessive (nominal) and indirect object (clausal) clitics are homophonous within the Balkan Slavic languages and Romanian. Pancheva (2004) shows that this syncretism is not just morphophonological but that the two types of clitics constitute identical feature bundles bearing dative case. Yet, these dative clitics seem to exhibit distinct behavior in the nominal and clausal domains: in Bulgarian the nominal clitics appear in second position within the nominal phrase while the clausal clitics are verb-adjacent and non-initial within the clause. It is puzzling that the same syntactic objects exhibit such different distributional patterns. I argue that in Bulgarian this seemingly distinct behavior follows from the interaction of a distributional constraint on dative clitics, NonInitiality within Spell-Out domains, and the different structural properties of the syntactic domains they are associated with. In particular, a number of constituents can be pre-clitic in clauses because various structural positions are available above the clitic, while in nominal phrases no comparable positions are available. Besides the direct consequences of this approach for the treatment of cliticization, it also provides an insight into the nature of Spell-Out domains, nominal and clausal structure, and the nature of syntax/PF interactions