Case contingency of Macedonian cliticization

Abstract

This paper analyzes patterns of cliticization in Macedonian. Macedonian is one of the two Slavic languages with verb-adjacent cliticization, the other one being Bulgarian. Like Bulgarian, Macedonian requires clitics to adjoin to verbal hosts. However, there are contexts in which the adjunction is not possible. This paper demonstrates that these environments involve hosts that do not have case-assigning properties. Moreover, this paper examines some other properties of Macedonian clitics, showing that in certain contexts they display characteristics of weak pronouns and verbal affixes, unexpectedly resembling certain properties of Polish cliticization.