To the Barrier! Or go to Wackernagel [К барьеру! Или иди к Ваккернагелю]

In this paper submitted for the Congratulatory website in honor of Andrej Anatolyevich Zaliznjak’s  80 year birthday ,I render different approaches to Wackernagel's law. I argue that a syntactic approach to clitic-external ordering gives the best possibilities to predict the actual distribution of word orders in those Clitic-Second languages with Wackernagel's law which license initial topicalized Barriers and have verb movement in declarative clauses. 

Clarification: Zaliznjak's use of the term 'barrier' (1993, 2008) largely concides with the descriptive label 'skipping' in terms of Halpern & Zwicky (1996). Zaliznjak, just as Halpern & Zwicky and their numerous followers, assumes that if <2P> clitics can skin their canonical position, i. e. clausal 2P,  on non-syntactic reasons and still be in 2P. The main difference between Halpern & Zwicky and Zaliznjak is that the latter claims that skipping is triggered by some 'rhythmical-syntactic barriers' i. e. sentence categories lying clause-externally and acknowledges the existence of selective barriers that place a certain clitic outside the clitic cluster, but leaves the remaining clitics in 2P (or there, where the canonic position of clusterization is). This point is important for the analysis of the world's languages with clitic clusters, e. g. Old Russian, Warlpiri, Cavinena, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Bulgarian etc. Despite Zaliznjak's model explains the fact that  splitting of clitic clusters is licensed in part of 2P languages, it is somewhat inferior to the alternative syntactic account sketched by Cavar & WIlder (1999). The issues of syntactic formalism incl. the question whether clitics are base-generated in 2P or can undergo movement (either leftward as assumed in the mainstream minimalism or righward) are briefly touched in this short paper of mine. For the more elaborate analysis and discussion of data see Zimmerling & Kosta (2013), Zimmerling (2013) and Zimmerling (2015) in the section 'related works'.