Topics First! In- and outside of Bulgarian wh-interrogatives

Abstract

In Jaeger (to appear) I have described clitic doubling in Bulgarian wh-interrogatives which constitutes a type of Superiority violation that cannot be accounted for by any existing analyses. By showing that clitic doubling of object wh-phrases marks topicality, I raised the hypothesis that many (or maybe all) so called Superiority effects in Bulgarian are due to topic-fronting of wh-phrases. Here, I provide further support for this hypothesis and show that there is also evidence for topic-fronting of non-object wh-phrases. Differences between colloquial and formal Bulgarian are restricted to how topical objects have to be realized at the source of the extraction (i.e. the VP), which also makes the account readily extendable to other multiple fronting languages. The complex ordering constraints on the left periphery are captured in a Linear Syntax approach (similar to but different from Kathol 2000).