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.
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.- French :
Enclitic
- Latin:
- Spanish:
- Ancient Greek:
- Sanskrit:
- Czech:
- Tamil:
- Telugu:
- Estonian: Enclitic -gi with the comitative case turns "with/having something" into "even with/having something". Without the enclitic, the saying would be rahaga vaene, which would mean that the predicate is "poor, but has money".
Endoclitic
However, other authors treat such forms as a sequence of clitics docked to the stem.
Mesoclitic
A mesoclitic is a type of clitic that occurs between the stem of a verb and its affixes. Mesoclisis is rare outside of formal standard Portuguese, where it is predominantly found. In Portuguese, mesoclitic constructions are typically formed with the infinitive form of the verb, a clitic pronoun, and a lexicalized tense affix.For example, in the sentence conquistar-se-á, the reflexive pronoun "se" appears between the stem conquistar and the future tense affix á. This placement of the clitic is characteristic of mesoclisis. Other examples include dá-lo-ei and matá-la-ia. These forms are typically found much more frequently in written Portuguese than in spoken varieties. Additionally, it is possible to use two clitics within a verb, as in dar-no-'lo-á and dar-ta'-ei.
This phenomenon is possible due to the historical evolution of the Portuguese synthetic future tense, which comes from the fusion of the infinitive form of the verb and the finite forms of the auxiliary verb haver. This origin explains why the clitic can appear between the verb stem and its tense marker, as the future tense was originally a separate word.
Colloquial Turkish exhibits an instance of a mesoclitic where the conjunction enclitic de is inserted after the gerundive suffix -e connecting the verb stem to the potential suffix -bilmek, effectively rendering it in its original auxiliary verb form bilmek. Suffixed auxiliary verbs cannot be converted into individual verbs in Standard Turkish, and the gerundive suffix is considered an inseparable part of them.
Distinction
One distinction drawn by some scholars 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: can stand alone in a phrase or sentence. They are unaccented and thus phonologically dependent upon a nearby word. They derive meaning only from that "host".Special clitics
Special clitics are morphemes that are bound to the word upon which they depend: they exist as a part of their host. That form, which is unaccented, represents a variant of a free form that carries stress. Both variants carry similar meaning and phonological makeup, but the special clitic is bound to a host word and is 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.
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: that, like affixes, they cannot appear without a host, and can only form an accentual unit in combination with their host. The term postlexical clitic is sometimes used for this sense of the term.Given this basic definition, further criteria are needed to establish a dividing line between clitics and affixes. 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:
- 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.
- Clitics do not exhibit arbitrary lexical gaps. Affixes, on the other hand, are often lexicalized and may simply not occur with certain words.
- 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.
- 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.
- Clitics can attach to material already containing clitics. Affixes can attach to other affixes, but not to material containing clitics. That is, an affix may appear between a stem and a clitic, but a clitic may not occur between a stem and an affix to that stem.
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 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 combines with a group of words or phrases to denote further meaning.
- 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.
- 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.
- In general, words are more morphologically complex than clitics. Clitics are rarely composed of more than one morpheme.
Word order
- 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?. Spevak reports that in her corpus of Caesar, Cicero and Sallust, these three words appear in such position in 100% of the cases.
- Russian has one: ли ' which acts as a general question marker. It always appears in second position in its sentence or proposition, and if the interrogation concerns one word in particular, that word is placed before it:
- * Он завтра придёт ', He’ll arrive tomorrow.
- * Придёт ли он завтра?, Will he arrive tomorrow?
- * Завтра ли он придёт?, Is it tomorrow that he’ll arrive?
- * Он ли завтра придёт?, Is it he who’ll arrive tomorrow?
- * Я не знаю, придёт ли он завтра , I don’t know whether he’ll arrive tomorrow.