In linguistics, a clitic is an element that has some of the properties of an independent word and some more typical of a bound morpheme. Many clitics can be understood as elements undergoing a historical process of grammaticalization:^[1] Linguistics is the scientific study of language. ... A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes. ... Bound morphemes can only occur when attached to root morphemes. ... Grammaticalisation, also referred to as Grammaticalization, Grammatisation or Grammatization is a theory describing the change of a content word (lexical morpheme) into a function word or grammatical affix. ...

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. 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. Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

One characteristic shared by all clitics is a lack of prosodic independence. A clitic must attach 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 (hyphen, apostrophe). In linguistics, prosody refers to intonation, rhythm, and vocal stress in speech. ...

Classification of clitics

A clitic that follows its host is called an enclitic.

• Latin: Senatus Populusque Romanus ("Senate people-and Roman" = "The Senate and Roman people")

A clitic that precedes its host is called a proclitic. Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ... The inscription in the Arch of Titus Modern coat of arms of Rome Manhole cover in Rome with SPQR inscription SPQR is an initialism from a Latin noun phrase, Senatus Populusque Romanus (The Senate and the People of Rome), referring to the government of the ancient Roman Republic, and used...

• English: an apple

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

• Portuguese: Ela levá-lo-ia. ("She take-it-COND" = "She would take it.")

A final type of clitic, 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.^[2]. Endoclitics are also found in Pashto ^[3]. The Udi language is a member of the Northeast Caucasian language family. ... Pashto (‎, IPA: ; also known as Pakhto, Pushto, Pashtoe, Pashtu, Pushtu, Pushtoo, Pathan, or Afghan language and Pukhto ‎) is a language spoken by people living in the southern half of Afghanistan and western Pakistan. ...

Properties of clitics

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 (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.

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.^[4] 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). The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonological point of view. ... In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest lingual unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ... In grammar, a part of speech or word class is defined as the role that a word (or sometimes a phrase) plays in a sentence. ... Look up phrase in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In grammar, a clause is a group of words consisting of a subject and a predicate, although, in non-finite clauses, the subject is often not explicitly given. ...

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 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: Jacob Wackernagel (also Jakob, 1853–1938) was an Indo-Europeanist and scholar of Sanskrit. ...

• Czech: Kde se to stalo? ("Where REFL that happened" = "Where did that happen?")

Several clitics appearing in the same position (sharing the same host) form a "clitic cluster". The relative order of clitics in a cluster is usually strictly fixed (just as affixes appear in a strict order within a single word):

• Czech: Nechtěli jsme vám ho dát. ("NOT-wanted 1PL to-you it give" = "We didn't want to give it to you.")
• Polish: Ty widziałbyś go jutro. ("you saw-COND-2sg him tomorrow" = "You would see him tomorrow.")

Clitics in English

English enclitics include: The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

• 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
• To express the possessive of a phrase:
  • 's in the girl next door's cat (It's not just the door's cat.)

English proclitics include: In linguistics, an auxiliary (also called helping verb, auxiliary verb, or verbal auxiliary) is a verb whose function it is to give further semantic or syntactic information about the main or full verb which follows it. ...

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

The contraction n't as in couldn't etc. has been shown to have the properties of an affix, rather than a syntactically independent clitic.^[5] In English, clitics must be unstressed, but not as a full word cannot be unstressed. Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

• I have not done it yet.
• I've not done it yet.
• I haven't done it yet.
• I'ven't done it yet. (dialectal non-standard)

Stress also prevents cliticization as follows:

• I don't know who she is. (*I don't know who she's.)
• Have you done it? —Yes, I have. (*Yes, I've.)
• He's not a fool. —He is a fool! (*He's a fool!) cf. He's not a genius, either.

Clitics in Romance

In the Romance languages, the articles and direct and indirect object personal pronoun forms are clitics. In Spanish, for example: The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence predicate. ... In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word that usually takes the place of a noun or noun phrase that was previously mentioned (such as she, it) or that refers to something or someone (I, me, you). Pronouns are often one of the basic parts of speech of the...

• las aguas /la'saguas/ ("the waters")
• lo atamos /loa'tamos/ ("it tied-1PL" = "we tied it")
• dámelo /'damelo/ ("give me it")

According to most criteria, in fact, the pronominal clitics in most of the Romance languages have already developed into affixes.^[6]

Some dialects of Portuguese (such as that spoken in Portugal) allow clitic object pronouns to surface as mesoclitics:^[7]

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

Further examples

In the Indo-European languages, some clitics can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European: for example, *-k^we is the original form of Sanskrit -ca, Greek te, and Latin -que. Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies The Indo-European languages include some 443 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. ... The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European languages. ... The Sanskrit language ( , ) is a classical language of India, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and one of the 22 official languages of India. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ...

• Latin: que and, ve or, ne (yes-no question)
• Greek: te and, de but, gar for (in a logical argument), oun therefore
• Russian: ли (yes-no question), же (emphasis), не not (proclitic), бы (subjunctive)
• Japanese: all particles, such as the genitive postposition の no and the topic marker は wa
• Dutch: 't definite article of neuter nouns and third person pronoun, 'k first person pronoun, je second person pronoun, -ie third person pronoun (this one should not be written as a separate word, i.e "Doet-ie 't nog?": "Is it still working?"; lit. "Does it still do it?")
• Plautdietsch: "Deit'a't vondoag?": "Will he do it today?"

Japanese particles, joshi ) or teniwoha ), in Japanese grammar are suffixes or short words which come after other words such as nouns, verbs and adjectives, indicating a wide range of grammatical functions. ... The genitive case is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun. ... A postposition is a type of adposition, a grammatical particle that expresses some sort of relationship between a noun phrase (its object) and another part of the sentence; an adpositional phrase functions as an adjective or adverb. ... In linguistics, the topic (or theme) is the part of the proposition that is being talked about (predicated). ... Plautdietsch, or Mennonite Low German, is a language spoken by the Mennonites, who are ethnically Dutch, but who adopted an East Low German dialect while they were refugees in the Vistula delta area of Royal Prussia (later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), beginning in the early-to-mid 1500s. ...

References

1. ^ Hopper, Paul J., Elizabeth Closs Traugott (2003). Grammaticalization, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-80421-3.
2. ^ Harris, Alice C. (2002). Endoclitics and the Origins of Udi Morphosyntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-1992-46335-X.
3. ^ Craig A. Kopris & Anthony R. Davis (AppTek, Inc. / StreamSage, Inc.) Endoclitics in Pashto: Implications for Lexical Integrity (abstract pdf)
4. ^ Zwicky, Arnold (1977). On Clitics. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
5. ^ Zwicky, Arnold M., Geoffrey K. Pullum (1983). "Cliticization vs. inflection: the case of English n't". Language 59: 502–315.
6. ^ Monachesi, Paola, Philip Miller (2003). “Les pronoms clitiques dans les langues romanes”, Danièle Godard (ed.): Les langues romanes: Problèmes de la phrase simple (in French). Paris: CNRS Editions, 67–123. ISBN 2-271-06149-0.
7. ^ Gadelii, Karl Erland (2002). "Pronominal Syntax in Maputo Portuguese (Mozambique) from a Comparative Creole and Bantu Perspective" (PDF). Africa & Asia 2: 27-41. ISSN 1650-2019. Retrieved on 2006-09-20.

Arnold Zwicky is a Visiting Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University, and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Ohio State University. ... ISSN, or International Standard Serial Number, is the unique eight-digit number applied to a periodical publication including electronic serials. ... 2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... September 20 is the 263rd day of the year (264th in leap years). ...

External links

• SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms: What is a clitic?

See also

• Affix
• Clitic doubling
• Possessive case
• Tmesis