Clitic Doubling - Degema

Degema

Clitic doubling occurs in Degema, as it does in Romance and Slavic languages. However, clitic doubling in Degema is not associated with the presence of a preposition as in Romance languages like Spanish nor is it associated with topicality or specificity as in Slavic languages like Bulgarian. Rather, what make clitic doubling in Degema possible are syntactic (movement and anaphoricity) and discourse (emphasis and/or familiarity) factors (Kari 2003) Consider (1) below:

(1) Eni mo=sire elephant cl=run 'An elephant is running'

In (1) the subject noun phrase (NP) 'Eni' is doubled by the clitic 'mo='. The clitic agrees in person, number and case with the doubled subject NP.

Example (2) shows that specific and non-specific subjects in Degema can be doubled by a clitic:

(2) Eni mo=rere (non-specific) elephant cl=walk 'An elephant is walking'

Eni mee mo=rere (specific) elephant my cl=walk 'My elephant is walking'

Example (3) shows that both topicalized and non-topicalized NPs in Degema can be doubled by a clitic:

(3) Okper o=kun esen (non-topicalized) Otter cl=catch.factative fish 'An Otter caught a fish'

Okper nu o=kun esen (topicalized) Otter Focus marker cl=catch.factative fish 'It was an Otter that caught a fish'

In Degema, the preposition does not feature in clitic doubling constructions in particular and in cliticization in general. Although there are object NPs such as indirect object NPs that can cooccur with a preposition, there are no corresponding object clitics to double them, unlike subject NPs.

Kari (2003: 135f) adds that "syntactic factors are stronger than discourse factors in the licensing of clitic doubling in Degema. Discourse factors only ensure the expression or suppression of the doubled NP after syntactic operations have taken place".