Complementizers and particles inside and outside of the left periphery: The case of Bulgarian revisited

The paper discusses the organization of the left periphery in Bulgarian and argues that it has a rich articulation guided by the general syntactic principles as established on a wide cross-linguistic basis. Bulgarian shows several points of dissociation with respect to the original theoretical template established by Rizzi’s 1997 seminal work. The paper discusses these points and brings new empirical evidence about the hierarchical ordering of complementizers in Bulgarian. The evidence shows that the declarative complementizer is merged in a low position within the left periphery and may optionally raise to the position related to the illocutionary force of the embedded clause, while the interrogative complementizers dispose of different and higher dedicated positions, as inferred from their relative order with respect to different types of contrastively focussed phrase. The paper also discusses the controversial modal particle da and argues that it does not occupy a position within the left periphery but given the independently established left peripheral positions, a mechanism is proposed about how its modal and finiteness features are related to selection and to veridicality as the guiding principle behind the organization of the left periphery of Bulgarian.