Clitics

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  Prosodic Phonology

  With a New Foreword

  • Marina Nespor, Irene Vogel(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 The Clitic Group 5.0. Introduction It has long been recognized that the problematic behavior of Clitics is due to their hybrid nature: 'Enclisis is neither true suffixation nor juxta-position of independent elements. It has the external characteristics of the former, . . . the inner feeling of the latter' (Sapir, 1930:71). Said in other words, a clitic is 'a form which resembles a word, but which can-not stand on its own as a normal utterance . . . ' (Crystal, 1980:64). The latter definition corresponds to the original meaning of the term 'clitic', from the Greek κλίνω 'to lean'. Though there are both syntactic and phonological ways in which Clitics 'lean', we will concentrate here on their phonological dependence. The most common approach in phonology is to consider Clitics either as belonging to the phonological word, in which case they are considered similar to affixes, or as belonging to the phonological phrase, in which case they are considered similar to independent words (see, among others, Booij, 1983; Zwicky, 1984). In section 5.1 it will be shown that Clitics cannot always be forced into either one of these categories, because their phonological behavior is often different from that of both affixes and independent words. That is, there are phonological phenomena that are characteristic only of the group consisting of a word plus clitic(s). On the basis of these observations, we conclude that there must be a constituent of prosodic structure that has exactly this extension. Section 5.2 contains a proposal as to the domain of this constituent, the clitic group (C), first proposed as a constituent of the prosodic hierarchy by Hayes (to appear). In addition, a specific case is examined which demonstrates the noniso-morphism between this particular level of prosodic structure and any constituent of the morpho-syntactic hierarchy.

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  Syntactic Analysis and Description

  A Constructional Approach

  • David Lockwood(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Based on their morphemes for leaning and forward, they termed them PROClitics. They had other unaccented words that attached to the preceding word, depending on it for accent, and they named them ENClitics, meaning words that lean backward. Based on the root found in these two words, modern linguists have coined the more general term Clitics for such unaccented words, whichever way they may lean. In general, a clitic may be defined as a grammatical item that behaves like a full word syntactically, but like an affix phonologically, in that it attaches to a preceding or following word. In general, we will want to classify an affix-like element as a clitic only if doing so will result in a more economical account of the grammatical facts than would result if we failed to do so. In the next several sections, particular criteria which usually make Clitics easy to recognize will be presented and exemplified. Identification by separability The identification of the English prepositions and articles, as in Table 8.2, as separate words depends on the fact that they are not always linked phonologically to the same kind of word. Table 8.1 made it appear that they were prefixes because they always seemed to attach to the nouns, but the further data made it clear that they attach to whatever word follows, and have particular syntactic positions in the phrase. We can say that words in such instances are identifiable as Clitics by the criterion of SEPARABILITY, meaning, of course, that they occur apart from any particular word (in this case the noun) rather than attached specifically to such a word the way an affix would be. Another example allowing similar identification of Clitics is found in the Basque data of Table 8.3. In this material, the simple examples, such as items 1-8, 17-18, 21-22, 25, 27, 29, and 31 are analogous to the preliminary English data of Table 8.1, while the remaining examples are more like the English material in Table 8.2.

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  Italian Clitics

  An Empirical Study

  • Cinzia Russi(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8 Clitics or affixes? 8.1. Introduction In Chapter 1 (§ 1.1), it was pointed out that the morphosyntactic status of Clitics has been a topic of active discussion in the linguistics literature, at least since the appearance of Zwicky (1977) seminal article. Nonetheless, a consensus has not been reached yet about the definition and categorization of Clitics. Indeed, the heterogeneous nature of these elements, combined to their complex and often seemingly idiosyncratic behavior, have led to the formulation of interesting definitions of Clitics, which nicely highlight the problematic status of these bound morphemes. An interesting one is the ‘working’ definition proposed by Sadock (1995: 260): “A clitic is a [sic] element whose distribution linguists cannot comfortably consign to a single grammatical component.” Nor has the issue been resolved as to whether there is enough evidence for positing a unified category of Clitics; that is, whether Clitics should be granted independent morphosyntactic status, or whether they should instead be integrated in the same category as affixes, or perhaps grouped with words. Establishing the morphosyntactic status of Italian pronominal Clitics is relevant to the analysis of the grammaticalization and lexicalization process they have been undergoing because doing so makes it possible to clarify which stages of grammaticalization Clitics have reached synchronically. If we are able to determine that in contemporary Italian pronominal Clitics have undeniably become inflectional, objective (in particular, accusative) affixes, which are equal in terms of status to the verbal affixes of tense/aspect and person/number, we can then claim that their grammaticali-zation has advanced towards the last stages of the continuum. Such a claim cannot be made, at least not categorically, if differences still exist between pronominal Clitics and the canonical verbal affixes found in Italian.

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  Prosodic Constituency in the Lexicon

  • Sharon Inkelas(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  1

  In the literature a one-to-one correspondence has often been assumed between function word status and clitichood (see e.g. Selkirk 1984, Hayes 1984/1989a, Berendsen 1986,2 Selkirk and Shen 1990). For example, in a discussion of English Selkirk 1984 treats as clitic ‘a word that is stressless and immediately adjacent, juncturally or rhythmically speaking, to what follows or what precedes’ (Selkirk 1984:340). Along similar lines, Hayes 1984 characterizes the clitic group as ‘a single content word together with all contiguous grammatical words in the same syntactic constituent’ (Hayes 1984:12).

  I will argue here, on the basis of English, that the implication between function word and clitic status does not hold universally.3 That is, within the class of function words, important distinctions exist which the definitions of Selkirk and Hayes do not capture.

  As pointed out by Kaisse 1985, there is a systematic difference among unstressed function words in English. For example, the voicing assimilation rule which we observed applying to the ’s form of the auxiliary in chapter 5 does not apply to the unstressed function words to, as, so and at in similar environments:

  (1)  

  a.  I don’t know what I could’ve said to John. (*said /d/ə)

  b.  That dog’s as tall as a horse. (*a/s/ tall)

  c.  She had never told so many lies in her life. (*told /z/o)

  d.  We sail at dawn.

  e.  (*a/d/ dawn)

  Second, unstressed function words differ with respect to the transparency of their phonological relationship to the corresponding full form. English has a rule of vowel reduction which takes short, unstressed vowels into a, and as a result a function word, when unstressed, can surface sounding reduced. In some cases, the relationship between an unstressed function word and its full-form counterpart is quite regular, as provided by this reduction rule.

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  The Bloomsbury Companion to Syntax

  • Silvia Luraghi, Claudia Parodi, Silvia Luraghi, Claudia Parodi(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  4 In the meantime, Clitics can display a morphological behavior typical of words as, for example, to be inflected in relevant grammatical categories: this is the case of pronouns or auxiliaries, two lexical classes that often belong in the inventory of a language’s Clitics. Thus, one way of characterizing Clitics is by saying that they are not phonological words, but that morphologically they must be considered words in their own right.

  Since Zwicky (1977) it is common to distinguish between “simple” and “special” Clitics. According to Zwicky’s definition, simple Clitics are unaccented variants of “real” words that lose their lexical accents in specific conditions as, for example, the unaccented form [əm] of English third person non-subject pronoun him . On the contrary, special Clitics are not simply unaccented variants of lexically accented words: they are lexically unaccented items, which have a distribution of their own, and, crucially, peculiar placement rules which appear to be cross-linguistically limited to a small number of options. Romance pronominal Clitics and second position, or P2, Clitics best illustrate special Clitics in this sense, partly on account of the fact that Zwicky’s definition is mostly worked out in order to accommodate specificities of Romance Clitics; as we will see in Section 4.2, some P2 Clitics have a somewhat more controversial status as they are lexically accented though confined to second position or at least ruled out from first position.

  1.2 Two Options for Clitic Placement Cross-linguistically, clitic placement is determined by two possible tendencies: (a) Clitics attach phonologically to specific constituents (constituent-based, or constituent-hosted Clitics);

  (b) Clitics attach to a specific position in a sentence, typically P2.5

  Klavans (1985) considers cliticization as a primarily syntactic phenomenon, with phonology only playing a role as a last factor. She considers the domain of cliticization to be determined syntactically, and draws a distinction between the structural host of a clitic, that is, the constituent to which the clitic belongs syntactically, and its phonological host, that is, the constituent to which the clitic attaches phonologically. In Klavan’s terms, type (a) Clitics attach to the same constituent both phonologically and syntactically, while P2 Clitics may attach to two different hosts (i.e. a phonological host and a distinct structural host at the same time).

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  A Grammar of Sierra Popoluca

  • Lynda Boudreault(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In subsequent chapters of this grammar, the boundaries between the Clitics and the stress bearing word are indicated this way in line one of transcriptions to aid readers in determining the stress bearing stem. 60 | 2 Phonology 2.4.1 Clitics Clitics occur at the outer edges of the words to which they attach and are extrametrical. That is, they do not take stress. In keeping with the widely accepted characteristic features of Clitics, they attach phonologically to words, undergoing the phonologi-cal processes to which affixes are subject (Klavans 1982; Zwicky and Pullum 1983; Zwicky 1977, 1985). In Sierra Popoluca, Clitics include person marking proClitics (2.130), derivational proClitics (2.131) and enClitics (2.132). (2.130) Person marking proClitics: ʔa+ /ʔa+/ ‘first exclusive absolutive’ ʔan+ /ʔan+/ ‘first exclusive ergative’ ta+ /ta+/ ‘first inclusive absolutive’ tan+ /tan+/ ‘first inclusive ergative’ mi+ /mi+/ ‘second absolutive’ ʔiny+ /ʔin+/ ‘second ergative’ ʔi+ /ʔi+/ ‘third ergative’ (2.131) Derivational and Subordinator ProClitics: na+ /na+/ ‘associative’ ʔak+ /ʔak+/ ‘causative’ ʔanh+ /ʔaŋ+/ ‘derives verbs/nouns’ ku+ /ku+/ ‘derives verbs/nouns’ ʔiga+ /ʔiɡa+/ ‘complementizer’ (2.132) EnClitics: +ʔam /+ʔam/ ‘already’ (verbal) +nam /+nam/ ‘still’ (verbal) +tyi /+t j i/ ‘just’ (verbal) +tam /+tam/ ‘first/second/animate plural marker’ +yaj /+jah/ ‘third person/inanimate plural marker’ +gak /+ɡak/ ‘another’ (nominal) +püʔk /+pɘʔk/ ‘relativizer’ (clausal) Clitics occur at the outer edges of the words, as shown in (2.133) and (2.134). (2.133) ProClitics: (a) /ʔan+kɔːbak/ [ʔaŋ.ˈkɔː.bak h ] ‘my head’ (b) /ʔan+ʔaj/ [ʔaʔ.ˈnaj ˚ ] ‘my leaf’ (c) /ʔan+ʔaŋ+sɔŋ=nuʔk–pa/ [ʔa.ɾaŋ.sɔŋ.ˈnuʔk.pa ʔ ] ‘I am going to cover it tight.’

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  Korean Morphosyntax: Focusing on Clitics and Their Roles in Syntax

  • Hee-Rahk Chae(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the previous chapters, we established a framework for a correct analysis of particles and provided a systematic analysis of them according to their morpho-syntactic status. In the meantime, we saw sporadically how they can be treated in syntactic analyses. In the remaining chapters, we are going to show systematically how our analyses of particles fit syntactic analyses of those constructions in which Clitics play an important role. In Section 5.1, we will provide a brief survey of structures that contain Clitics. As seen in Section 3.4 , there are clitic members in nouns, adjectives, adnouns, adverbs, delimiters, postpositions and conjunctions. In Section 5.2, we will observe basic properties of the nominalizers -(u)m and -ki , adnominalizers such as -nun and -(u)n , and adverbializers such as -e/a/ye and -ko . These Clitics constitute clausal connectives (CCs), which have the property of requiring a clause as their complement. On the basis of these observations, in the next chapter, we will analyze three representative constructions in which Clitics are essential in characterizing them. The existence of Clitics has led to difficulties in defining linguistic units in Korean, especially words and phrases. Those units that contain affixes are words (i.e., derived words or inflected words). Although they consist of two or more component words, compounds are also words because they behave just like (other) words. Those (non-compound) units that consist of two or more words, including Clitics, are phrases. Since the existence of Clitics has not been appreciated, they have usually been analyzed as affixes. Hence, many phrases containing Clitics are (wrongly) assumed to be derived words (e.g., kenkang-ha-‘to be healthy’). 1 As will be seen, however, we will not face such a problem here because we are treating Clitics as Clitics, that is, as words in phrases.

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  Clitics in the Languages of Europe

  • Henk van Riemsdijk(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova Clitics in the Slavic Languages 1 1. Introduction The present paper represents an overview of the clitic elements found across the Slavic languages with a focus on the South-Slavic group. All Slavic languages, except for Belorussian, exhibit Clitics of the type described by Zwicky (1977) as special Clitics', that is to say, weak forms whose distribution does not follow from the rules of regular (i.e. non-clitic) syntax. 2 Here belong pronominal Clitics, the reflexive clitic, the forms of the auxiliary 'to be', and, in some of the languages, the question clitic li. Ukrainian and Russian are the only languages with a 'poorclitic system in that only the form by 3 used in Conditionals is a clitic. On a non-standard level, Russian also has weak forms of the 2 P,SG pronominal and the Dative reflexive. The most salient issues in the discussion of Slavic cliticization have been: a) the position of Clitics relevant to clause (phrase) structure, and b) defining the position of Clitics relative to their host, i.e. whether Clitics can be treated as 'enClitics' and 'proClitics' per se. Additional, much argued problems include the number of clitic elements for each language, i.e. whether the clitic category should cover words traditionally referred to in the literature as 'particles', such as the negation word, the question word li, non-declined auxiliaries like Bulgarian future ste, etc. With respect to this issue the view of the present paper is in line with the two-partite distinction suggested by Zwicky (1985) between clitic words and non-clitic words. Thus the term 'particle', which is not based on any strict criterion, will not be part of the vocabulary of the present paper. Relevant to South-Slavic, an important issue is the phenomenon described as clitic doubling, that is to say the occurrence within the same clause boundary of both a full NP/pronominal and a clitic replica.

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  The Nominal Structure in Slavic and Beyond

  • Lilia Schürcks, Anastasia Giannakidou, Urtzi Etxeberria, Lilia Schürcks, Anastasia Giannakidou, Urtzi Etxeberria(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Peter Kosta and Anton Zimmerling Slavic Clitic Systems in a Typological Perspective ¹ 1 Aims and framework The paper offers a description of Slavic word order systems from the viewpoint of formal typology based on such notions as syntactic type, parametric settings, basic and derived order, linearization constraints, constituency, movement, spell-out, cliticity, clitic clusters, syntax-prosody interface, and grammaticalization. The general aim is to classify Slavic word order systems with Clitics on the basis of syntactic constraints without dependence on hypotheses about language-spe-cific properties of prosodically deficient elements and to provide a viable typo-logical classification, which can be verified by data from other world’s languages. There is an important line of research based on the hypothesis that prosodi-cally deficient elements, proClitics and enClitics, are also syntactically deficient and constitute a natural class definable in UG (Zwicky 1977). Along this line, the placement of Clitics is determined by their intrinsic properties. Many linguists have worked out the insight that some of the mechanisms of clitic linearization are applied post-syntactically and motivated by the need to resolve a mistmatch between the output of the syntax and prosodic and/or morphological require-ments (cf. Halpern 1996, Franks 2008:95). Recent studies of the syntax-prosody interface show a gradual increase of the emphasis made on the prosodic compo-nent at the expense of syntax. The progress in the description of Slavic languages with Clitics is considerable. However, some constraints on the placement of Clitics directly or indirectly entail constraints on the placement of non-clitic sentence categories. If constraints of the latter type are straightforwardly explained as an outcome of the allegedly purely prosodic or merely morphological ordering of Clitics, there is a risk of overlooking syntactic mechanisms relevant for clausal architecture.

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  The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics

  • José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Erin O'Rourke, José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Erin O'Rourke(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The diagnostics reviewed in the previous section show that the behavior of Clitics is not that of a full-fledged phrase. They are morphological heads that need to be part of a phonological prosodic unit. Therefore, it is natural to assume that Clitics are heads that attach to another head in which they can form a prosodic unit, and therefore have a different distribution from corresponding XPs. For most cases, the source of the Clitics in Spanish is transparent: either DO or IO, as shown above. However, there are interesting features that differentiate Clitics from their non clitic counterparts. For instance, DO Clitics must necessarily have a specific referent, as shown by the fact that they cannot co-occur with an indefinite interpreted as nonspecific (see Roca 1992; Sportiche 1996):

  (26)

  *Un reloj,	lo	compré	ayer.
  A watch	3rd.masc.sg	bought	yesterday
  ‘A watch I bought yesterday’

  (27)

  *Dinero,	no lo	tengo.
  Money, not	3rd.masc.sg	have
  ‘Money I do not have’

  Clitics usually correspond to arguments of verbs. However, dative Clitics might correspond to arguments of an adjective:

  (28)

  Es	fiel	a Juan.
  Is	faithful	to Juan
  ‘He/She is faithful to Juan’

  (29)

  Le	es	fiel.
  3rd.dat	is	faithful
  ‘He/She is faithful to him/her’

  Spanish, contrary to most other Romance languages, lacks partitive and locative Clitics. Thus, when a partitive or locative argument is dislocated, no clitic appears with the verb:

  (30) A Barcelona, no voy a ir. ‘To Barcelona, I am not going’ (31) Manzanas, no venden en ese supermercado. Apples, not sell in that supermarket ‘They do not sell apples in the supermarket’

  In some cases the Clitics might lack an argumental source. This is what it is found in the clitic of interest or ethical datives. These dative Clitics indicate that the action might benefit or not a third party in many cases:

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