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. The term is derived from the Greek for "leaning". It is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. For example, the English word an is a clitic in the phrase an apple.

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 on which they depend (like the Latin clitic que, meaning "and"), or separated by special characters such as hyphens or apostrophes (like the English clitics 's and 'll).

Classification

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

Proclitic

A proclitic appears before its host.

• English: an apple
• French: Je t'aime.

"I you-love." = "I love you."

• Ancient Greek: ὁ ἄνθρωπος

"the person"

Enclitic

An enclitic appears after its host.

• Latin: Senatus Populusque Romanus

"Senate people-and Roman" = "The Senate and Roman people"

• Ancient Greek: ánthrōpoí (te) theoí te

"people (and) gods and" = "(both) men and gods"

Mesoclitic

A mesoclitic appears between the stem of the host and other affixes.

• Portuguese: Ela levá-lo-ia.

"She take-it-COND." = "She would take it."

Endoclitic

The endoclitic splits apart the root and is inserted between the two pieces. Endoclitics defy the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis (Lexicalist Hypothesis) and so were long claimed to be impossible, but evidence from the Udi language suggests that they do 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.

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, 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 (prefix, suffix, infix, etc.). 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 (a hyphen or an apostrophe, for example).^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]}

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 (since from a historical point of view, a given form can move gradually from one to the other by morphologization). 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.^{[citation needed]}

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 (e.g., the Romance pronominal clitics discussed below).^{[citation needed]}

Comparison with words

Similar to the discussion above, clitics must be able to be distinguished from words. There have been a number of linguistic tests proposed 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 with them. Six such tests are described below. These, of course, are not the only ways to differentiate between words and clitics.

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.

If the addition of a morpheme to a word prevents further affixation, then it is likely a clitic.

If a morpheme combines with single words to convey a further degree of meaning, then it is likely a clitic. A word will combine with a group of words or phrases to denote further meaning.

If a morpheme is required to 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.

If a morpheme’s allowable behavior is determined by one principle, it is likely an clitic. For example, "a" proceeds indefinite nouns in English. Words can rarely be described with one such description.

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 clitics to appear in "second position", after the first syntactic phrase or the first stressed word in a clause:

• Latin had three enclitics that appeared in second or third position of a clause: enim 'indeed, for', autem 'but, moreover', vero 'however'. For example, quis enim potest negare? (from Martial's epigram LXIV, literally "who indeed can to-deny [her riches]?"). Spevak (2010) reports that in her corpus of Caesar, Cicero and Sallust, these three words appear in such position in 100% of the cases.

Indo-European languages

Germanic languages

English

English proclitics include:

• a ____ in a desk
• an ____ in an egg
• the ____ in the house

English enclitics include:

• The abbreviated forms of be:
  • ’m in I’m
  • ’re in you’re
  • ’s in she’s
• The abbreviated forms of auxiliary verbs:
  • ’ll in they’ll
  • ’ve in they’ve
  • ’d in you’d
• The possessive marker, at least when used to mark an entire noun phrase:
  • ’s in The Queen of England's crown

The negative marker n’t as in couldn’t etc. is often thought to be a clitic 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.

In natural speech the above enclitics cannot themselves carry stress, even in those cases where they are syllabic. The full form of the word they replace may be stressed (and this is a common reason for using it rather than the clitic). For example:

• Tim'll be a good manager (the clitic 'll cannot be stressed)
• He'll be a good manager (the clitic 'll certainly cannot be stressed as it is not a separate syllable; if stress is placed on the syllable he'll the effect is to emphasize he)
• He/Tim will be a good manager (in this case the word will can be stressed, and this is likely the intention in speech and informal writing, where 'll would have been used if no stress had been intended)

In the case of n't, the negation can also be emphasized by stressing the word to which the clitic is attached:

• He wouldn't be a good manager (stressing wouldn't has a similar effect to stressing not in the version without the clitic)

Auxiliaries and copulas without an explicit governed verb or complement after them cannot be replaced by a clitic, even if they are not stressed:

• I don’t know who she is any more. (not *...she's any more.)
• Has anyone done it yet? Yes, I have. (not *...Yes, I've.)

Other Germanic languages

• Old Norse: The definite article was the enclitic -inn, -in, -itt (masculine, feminine and neuter nominative singular), as in álfrinn "the elf", gjǫfin "the gift", and tréit "the tree", an abbreviated form of the independent pronoun hinn, cognate of the German pronoun jener. It was fully declined for gender, case and number. Since both the noun and enclitic were declined, this led to "double declension". The situation remains similar in modern Faroese and Icelandic, but in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, the enclitics have become endings.
• Dutch: 't definite article of neuter nouns and third person singular neuter pronoun, 'k first person pronoun, je second person singular pronoun, ie third person masculine singular pronoun, ze third person plural pronoun
• Plautdietsch: "Deit'a't vondoag?": "Will he do it today?"
• Gothic: Sentence clitics appear in second position in accordance with Wackernagel's Law, including -u (yes-no question), -uh "and", þan "then", ƕa "anything", for example ab-u þus silbin "of thyself?". Multiple clitics can be stacked up, and will split a preverb from the rest of the verb if the preverb comes at the beginning of the clause, e.g. diz-uh-þan-sat ijōs "and then he seized them (fem.)", ga-u-ƕa-sēƕi "whether he saw anything".

Romance languages

In the Romance languages, the articles and direct and indirect object personal pronoun forms are clitics. In Spanish, for example:

• las aguas [laˈsaɣwas] ("the waters")
• lo atamos [loaˈtamos] ("it tied-1PL" = "we tied it")
• dámelo [ˈdamelo] ("give me it")

Another example in Spanish, involving object pronoun clitics, demonstrates the inability of some clitics to stand on their own:

• a. Magdalena está cantándolo.
• b. Magdalena lo está cantando.
• c. Magdalena está lo cantando. (ungrammatical)
• 'Magdalena is singing it.'

The sentences (a) and (b) are acceptable sentences in Spanish. Sentence (c), however, is not an acceptable due to incorrect placement of the pronoun lo, even though it can appear both before está and after cantando.

There is still some debate as to whether or not this change from clitic to affix has occurred with French subject pronouns. Subject pronouns, especially, are still considered clitics as they force a topicalized reading of a coindexed XP.

To illustrate this, consider the following sentences :

• Je le prends et mange (litt. I take and eat it)
• Je le prends et le mange (litt. I take it and eat it)
• Je le prends et je le mange (litt. I take it and I eat it)

The first would be considered quite archaic; out of context, most modern speakers would understand it as "I take it and eat". In this sense, le can be considered an affix. The second would be understood as is, but would be considered fairly formal. The third would be more informal ("je le" would also likely be pronounced as j'le [ʒlœ] or je l'‎ [ʒœl] here, making them unseparable).

Although mesoclisis is extremely formal in Brazilian Portuguese and tends to be circumscribed in lesser formal registers by avoiding synthetical future/conditional verb forms, European Portuguese still allows clitic object pronouns to surface as mesoclitics in colloquial situations:

• Ela levá-lo-ia ("She take-it-would" – "She would take it").
• Eles dar-no-lo-ão ("They give-us-it-will" – "They will give it to us").

Proto-Indo-European

In the Indo-European languages, some clitics can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European: for example, *-kʷe is the original form of Sanskrit च (-ca), Greek τε (-te), and Latin -que.

• Latin: -que "and", -ve "or", -ne (yes-no question)
• Greek: τε "and", δέ "but", γάρ "for" (in a logical argument), οὖν "therefore"

Slavic languages

• Russian: ли (yes-no question), же (emphasis), то (emphasis), не "not" (proclitic), бы (subjunctive)
• Czech: special clitics: weak personal and reflexive pronouns (mu, "him"), certain auxiliary verbs (by, "would"), and various short particles and adverbs (tu, "here"; ale, "though"). "Nepodařilo by se mi mu to dát" "I would not succeed in giving it to him". In addition there are various simple clitics including short prepositions.
• Polish: -by (conditional mood particle), się (reflexive, also modifies meaning of certain verbs), no (emphasis), -m, -ś, -śmy, -ście (personal auxiliary), mi, ci, cię, go, mu &c. (unstressed personal pronouns in oblique cases)

Other languages

• Hungarian: the marker of indirect questions is -e: Nem tudja még, jön-e. "He doesn't know yet if he'll come." This clitic can also mark direct questions with a falling intonation. Is ("as well") and se ("not... either") also function as clitics: although written separately, they are pronounced together with the preceding word, without stress: Ő is jön. "He'll come too." Ő sem jön. "He won't come, either."
• Japanese: all particles, such as the genitive postposition の (no) and the topic marker は (wa).
• Korean: The copula 이다 (ida) and the adjectival 하다 (hada), as well as some nominal and verbal particles (e.g. 는, neun). However, alternative analysis suggests that the nominal particles do not function as clitics, but as phrasal affixes.
• Arabic: Suffixes standing for direct object pronouns and/or indirect object pronouns (as found in Indo-European languages) are suffixed to verbs, possessive determiners are suffixed to nouns, and pronouns are suffixed to particles.
• Ganda: -nga attached to a verb to form the progressive; -wo 'in' (also attached to a verb)
• Somali: pronominal clitics, either subject or object clitics, are required in Somali. These exist as simple clitics postponed to the noun they apply to. Lexical arguments can be omitted from sentences, but pronominal clitics cannot be.[

See also

• Clitic climbing
• Clitic doubling
• Genitive case
• Grammatical particle
• Possessive case
• Separable affix
• Tmesis
• Weak and strong forms in English
• Weak pronoun