Introducing Clitics

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Background

In most languages we find ‘little words’ which resemble a full word, but which cannot stand on their own. Instead they have to ‘lean on’ a neighbouring word, like the ’d, ’ve and unstressed ’em of Kim’d’ve helped’em (‘Kim would have helped them’). These are clitics, and they are found in most of the world’s languages. In English the clitic forms appear in the same place in the sentence that the full form of the word would appear in, but in many languages clitics obey quite separate rules of placement.

Clitics are a notoriously difficult topic that has received much attention, from a number of theoretical vantage points, since the appearance of Zwicky’s (1977) seminal article “On clitics.” What emerges from this vast body of work is that clitics are more easily characterized by what they are not, than by what they are. Elements referred to as clitics systematically defy the general distributional and other principles that otherwise hold in the grammar. But while the phonology and syntax of clitics appears to be unlike the phonology and syntax of other linguistic elements, there are no obvious phonological or syntactic properties that uniquely characterize the class of clitics.

Every language in the world has some characteristic of independent words and some characteristic of affixes, in particular, inflectional affixes, within words. Those elements act like single-word syntactic constituents in that they function as heads, arguments, or modifiers within phrases, but like affixes, they are “dependent” on adjacent words. In English, various forms of auxiliary verbs have “reduced” variants that are phonologically dependent on the word immediately preceding them, as in My friend from Chicago’s going to arrive soon, with a /z/ variant of is attached to Chicago. In another variant, unaccented object pronouns her, him, and them have “reduced” versions, consisting only of a syllabic sonorant, which are phonologically dependent on a immediately preceding verb or preposition, as in We gave’em to ‘er “We gave them to her”.

Essentially, these two opposing views continue to exist in contention because there is good evidence in favour of both. The majority of possessives actually occurring in speech, i.e. simple possessives in which the possessor noun directly precedes the possessum, are technically ambiguous. We could analyse the possessive marker in sentences like either as a clitic, or as an affix (a genitive case morpheme) on the possessor noun.

Clitics generally have grammatical meaning, rather than lexical meaning.  Most belong to closed classes like pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and conjunctions. They usually attach to the edges of words, outside of derivational and inflectional affixes.

Clitics are not always obvious, because analysts tend to jump to conclusions about whether something is a word or an affix. When you get data in written form, decisions about where to put spaces have already been made. Clitics may be written either as words or affixes, perhaps inconsistently.

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