Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

Jelena Stojković (Leipzig): The Fleeting DP in Bulgarian and Macedonian: The view from Left-Branch Extraction

This talk is concerned with restrictions on Left-Branch Extraction (LBE) in Bulgarian and Macedonian, the only two Slavic languages with articles. The data indicate that the availability of LBE is related to the number of modifiers, and thus require a revision of the generalisation that all languages with articles disallow LBE. Following Calabrese and Pescarini (2014); Martinović (2019), a solution based on the order of operations is proposed, connecting the availability of LBE to the idea that projections can be removed via syntactic operations such as Exfoliation (Pesetsky 2019). The successful application of Exfoliation depends on the relative timing of article placement, which in turn is performed via a post-syntactic operation of Generalised Lowering (similar to Embick and Noyer 2001). Exfoliation and subsequently LBE are fed by an early application of Lowering, assumed to be able to interleave narrow syntax (Martinović 2019), but if applied late, Lowering counter-feeds these two operations.