Clitic


In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host. A clitic is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the form of affixes, but the distribution of function words. For example, the contracted forms of the auxiliary verbs in I'm and we've are clitics.
Clitics can belong to any grammatical category, although they are commonly pronouns, determiners, or adpositions. Note that orthography is not always a good guide for distinguishing clitics from affixes: clitics may be written as separate words, but sometimes they are joined to the word they depend on, or separated by special characters such as hyphens or apostrophes.

Classification

Clitics fall into various categories depending on their position in relation to the word they connect to.

Proclitic

A proclitic appears before its host. It is common in Romance languages. For example, in French, there is "il s'est réveillé", or "je t'aime".

Enclitic

An enclitic appears after its host.
A mesoclitic appears between the stem of the host and other affixes. For example, in Portuguese, conquistar-se-á, dá-lo-ei, matá-la-ia. These are found much more often in writing than in speech. It is even possible to use two pronouns inside the verb, as in dar-no-lo-á, or dar-ta-ei. As in other Western Romance languages, the Portuguese synthetic future tense comes from the merging of the infinitive and the corresponding finite forms of the verb haver, which explains the possibility of separating it from the infinitive.

Endoclitic

The endoclitic splits apart the root and is inserted between the two pieces. Endoclitics defy the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis and so were long thought impossible. However, evidence from the Udi language suggests that they exist. Endoclitics are also found in Pashto and are reported to exist in Degema.

Distinction

One important distinction divides the broad term 'clitics' into two categories, simple clitics and special clitics. This distinction is, however, disputed.

Simple clitics

Simple clitics are free morphemes, meaning they can stand alone in a phrase or sentence. They are unaccented and thus phonologically dependent upon a nearby word. They only derive meaning from this "host".

Special clitics

Special clitics are morphemes that are bound to the word they are dependent upon, meaning they exist as a part of their host. This form, which is unaccented, represents a variant of a free form that does carry stress. While the two variants carry similar meaning and phonological makeup, the special clitic is bound to a host word and unaccented.

Properties

Some clitics can be understood as elements undergoing a historical process of grammaticalization:
lexical item → clitic → affix
According to this model from Judith Klavans, an autonomous lexical item in a particular context loses the properties of a fully independent word over time and acquires the properties of a morphological affix. At any intermediate stage of this evolutionary process, the element in question can be described as a "clitic". As a result, this term ends up being applied to a highly heterogeneous class of elements, presenting different combinations of word-like and affix-like properties.

Prosody

One characteristic shared by many clitics is a lack of prosodic independence. A clitic attaches to an adjacent word, known as its host. Orthographic conventions treat clitics in different ways: Some are written as separate words, some are written as one word with their hosts, and some are attached to their hosts, but set off by punctuation.

Comparison with affixes

Although the term "clitic" can be used descriptively to refer to any element whose grammatical status is somewhere in between a typical word and a typical affix, linguists have proposed various definitions of "clitic" as a technical term. One common approach is to treat clitics as words that are prosodically deficient: they cannot appear without a host, and they can only form an accentual unit in combination with their host. The term "postlexical clitic" is used for this narrower sense of the term.
Given this basic definition, further criteria are needed to establish a dividing line between postlexical clitics and morphological affixes, since both are characterized by a lack of prosodic autonomy. There is no natural, clear-cut boundary between the two categories. However, by identifying clusters of observable properties that are associated with core examples of clitics on the one hand, and core examples of affixes on the other, one can pick out a battery of tests that provide an empirical foundation for a clitic/affix distinction.
An affix syntactically and phonologically attaches to a base morpheme of a limited part of speech, such as a verb, to form a new word. A clitic syntactically functions above the word level, on the phrase or clause level, and attaches only phonetically to the first, last, or only word in the phrase or clause, whichever part of speech the word belongs to.
The results of applying these criteria sometimes reveal that elements that have traditionally been called "clitics" actually have the status of affixes.
Zwicky and Pullum postulated five characteristics that distinguish clitics from affixes:
  1. Clitics do not select their hosts. That is, they are "promiscuous", attaching to whichever word happens to be in the right place. Affixes do select their host: They only attach to the word they are connected to semantically, and generally attach to a particular part of speech.
  2. Clitics do not exhibit arbitrary gaps. Affixes, on the other hand, are often lexicalized and may simply not occur with certain words.
  3. Clitics do not exhibit morphophonological idiosyncrasies. That is, they follow the morphophonological rules of the rest of the language. Affixes may be irregular in this regard.
  4. Clitics do not exhibit semantic idiosyncrasies. That is, the meaning of the phrase-plus-clitic is predictable from the meanings of the phrase and the clitic. Affixes may have irregular meanings.
  5. Clitics can attach to material already containing clitics. Affixes can attach to other affixes, but not to material containing clitics.
An example of differing analyses by different linguists is the discussion of the possessive in English, some linguists treating it as an affix, while others treat it as a special clitic.

Comparison with words

Similar to the discussion above, clitics must be distinguishable from words. Linguists have proposed a number of tests to differentiate between the two categories. Some tests, specifically, are based upon the understanding that when comparing the two, clitics resemble affixes, while words resemble syntactic phrases. Clitics and words resemble different categories, in the sense that they share certain properties. Six such tests are described [|below]. These, of course, are not the only ways to differentiate between words and clitics.
  1. If a morpheme is bound to a word and can never occur in complete isolation, then it is likely a clitic. In contrast, a word is not bound and can appear on its own.
  2. If the addition of a morpheme to a word prevents further affixation, then it is likely a clitic.
  3. If a morpheme combines with single words to convey a further degree of meaning, then it is likely a clitic. A word combines with a group of words or phrases to denote further meaning.
  4. If a morpheme must be in a certain order with respect to other morphemes within the construction, then it is likely a clitic. Independent words enjoy free ordering with respect to other words, within the confines of the word order of the language.
  5. If a morpheme's allowable behavior is determined by one principle, it is likely a clitic. For example, "a" precedes indefinite nouns in English. Words can rarely be described with one such description.
  6. In general, words are more morphologically complex than clitics. Clitics are rarely composed of more than one morpheme.

    Word order

Clitics do not always appear next to the word or phrase that they are associated with grammatically. They may be subject to global word order constraints that act on the entire sentence. Many Indo-European languages, for example, obey Wackernagel's law, which requires sentential clitics to appear in "second position", after the first syntactic phrase or the first stressed word in a clause:

Germanic languages

English

enclitics include the contracted versions of auxiliary verbs, as in I'm and we've. Some also regard the possessive marker, as in The Queen of England's crown as an enclitic, rather than a genitival inflection.
Some consider the infinitive marker to and the English articles a, an, the to be proclitics.
The negative marker n’t as in couldn’t etc. is typically considered a clitic that developed from the lexical item not. Linguists Arnold Zwicky and Geoffrey Pullum argue, however, that the form has the properties of an affix rather than a syntactically independent clitic.

Other Germanic languages

In Romance languages, some feel the object personal pronoun forms are clitics. Others consider them affixes, as they only attach to the verb they are the object of. There is no general agreement on the issue. For the Spanish object pronouns, for example:
Colloquial European Portuguese allows object suffixes before the conditional and future suffixes of the verbs:
Colloquial Portuguese of Brazil and Portugal and Spanish of the former Gran Colombia allow ser to be conjugated as a verbal clitic adverbial adjunct to emphasize the importance of the phrase compared to its context, or with the meaning of "really" or "in truth":
Note that this clitic form is only for the verb ser and is restricted to only third-person singular conjugations. It is not used as a verb in the grammar of the sentence but introduces prepositional phrases and adds emphasis. It does not need to concord with the tense of the main verb, as in the second example, and can be usually removed from the sentence without affecting the simple meaning.

Proto-Indo-European

In the Indo-European languages, some clitics can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European: for example, *' is the original form of Sanskrit ', Greek ', and Latin '.
In Croatian these clitics follow the first stressed word in the sentence or clause in most cases, which may have been inherited from Proto-Indo-European, even though many of the modern clitics became cliticised much more recently in the language. In subordinate clauses and questions, they follow the connector and/or the question word respectively.
Examples ", mi "to me", vam "to you :
In certain rural dialects this rule is very strict, whereas elsewhere various exceptions occur. These include phrases containing conjunctions, nouns with a genitival attribute, proper names and titles and the like Ivana Marić " Ivana Marić", grad Zagreb "the city, and in many local varieties clitics are hardly ever inserted into any phrases. In cases like these, clitics normally follow the initial phrase, although some Standard grammar handbooks recommend that they should be placed immediately after the verb.
Examples:
Clitics are however never inserted after the negative particle ne, which always precedes the verb in Croatian, or after prefixes, and the interrogative particle li always immediately follows the verb. Colloquial interrogative particles such as da li, dal, jel appear in sentence-initial position and are followed by clitics.
Examples: