The comparative syntax of Albanian: on the contribution of syntactic types to propositional interpretation

The main focus of this dissertation is on the existence of a systematic relationship between syntactic structure and propositional interpretation. The exploration of this relationship is in this thesis done by highlighting what Albanian, a language that has received relatively little scholarly attention in the generative paradigm, has to tell us about UG. Within the theory of UG, syntactic constituents are made up of smaller constituents and may combine with other constituents to compose yet others. That is, syntactic relations are hierarchical and compositional. Within the Principles and Parameters framework, it is generally assumed that initial syntactic relations re ect semantic relations and that languages differ from each other in the way they instantiate these semantic relations. On the assumption that semantics is compositional, that is, the meaning of an expression is a function of the meaning of its parts, it follows that propositional interpretation is determined by the semantics of the syntactic constituents that it consists of. The thesis starts with an examination of the effects of direct object clitic doubling in Albanian and Greek on propositional interpretation. Crucially, the thesis argues that direct object doubling clitics in these languages are operators that license topichood. More technically, I claim that direct object clitic doubling unequivocally marks direct object DPs as [-Focus], which in analogy with the [+Focus] feature on phrases, is in this dissertation de®ned as an operator feature. The investigation of direct object clitic doubling in Albanian and Greek parallels a discussion of scrambling in Germanic. I argue that scrambling in Germanic is an operation that yields the same effect as direct object clitic doubling in Albanian and Greek. Consequently, clitic doubling and scrambling of direct object DPs do not induce speci®city, presuppositionality and/or strength, as has been claimed for doubling in Romance or for scrambling in German/Dutch (Sportiche 1992). I argue instead that the locus of speci®city/presuppositionality/strength is the D-position, which for noun phrases underlies argumenthood. In addition, I show that in apparent cases of optional doubling/scrambling, there is in fact no optionality. Dealing with issues of syntactic representation, I discuss in particular how the view that direct object clitic doubling and scrambling mark their associated DPs as unambiguously [-Focus] may be implemented successfully within the minimalist framework by preserving Sportiche's basic assumption that clitics head their own maximal projections as well as the clitic parameters that he establishes. Other issues relating to the discussion of clitic doubling patterns treated in the thesis concern the structure of restrictive relative clauses (RRC) and an account of certain asymmetries of direct object clitic doubling in such clauses, as well as the structure of clitic left dislocated constructions. In Albanian and Greek RRCs, clitic doubling of the associate of the relative clause is licit when the latter is inde®nite and illicit when it is de®nite. This phenomenon is illustrated through the Albanian examples (1a) vs. (1b).