Torlak clitic doubling: A cross-linguistic comparison

This paper examines the types of clitics and clitic placement in Torlak. This vernacular, spoken in South-Eastern Serbia, also called the Prizren-Timok variety, whose genealogical position is still debatable, requires more attention from the scientific community. In this article, I describe clitic constructions, particularly the ones of clitic doubling and word order in Torlak by presenting data collected in the area of Trgovište and comparing it to the description of Bulgarian provided in Krapova & Cinque (2008). A further crosslinguistic comparison with Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian gives an insight into the relatedness of Torlak to the two typologically different areas: a Balkan Slavic and a non-Balkan Slavic one. This is particularly interesting since Torlak has clitic doubling, which makes it similar to Bulgarian and Macedonian, but it has second-position clitics, which makes it similar to Serbo-Croatian, thereby challenging certain cross-linguistic generalizations of Bošković (2001; 2004a,b; 2007; 2016). The overall results allow us to have a clearer picture of the use of clitics in this non-standard variety.