In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase.^[1] It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level. For example, the word an in the phrase:

an apple

Clitics may belong to any grammatical category, though they are commonly pronouns, determiners or adpositions. Note that orthography is not a good guide for identifying clitics: clitics may be written as independent words, bound affixes, or separated by special characters (e.g., apostrophe).

Classification[link]

There are a number of different clitics depending on their position in relation to the word that they are connected to.

Proclitic[link]

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[link]

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[link]

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[link]

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] and are reported to exist in Degema.^[4]

Properties[link]

Some clitics can be understood as elements undergoing a historical process of grammaticalization:^[5]

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[link]

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).

Comparison with affixes[link]

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.^[6] 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).

Word order[link]

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:

• 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.")

Indo-European languages[link]

Germanic languages[link]

English[link]

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
• The genitive case (or "possessive") marker, at least when used to mark an entire noun phrase:
  • ’s in The Queen of England's crown

English proclitics include:

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

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.^[7] In English, clitics must be unstressed, but not as a full word cannot be unstressed.

• 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)

A stressed word cannot be changed into a clitic:

• 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!)

Other Germanic languages[link]

• 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[link]

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")

According to most criteria, in fact, the pronominal clitics in most of the Romance languages have already developed into affixes.^[8]

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.^[9]

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 (and "je le" would be likely to be pronounced as "j'le" or "je l'" here).

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:^[10]

• 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[link]

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[link]

• 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[link]

• 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).^[11] However, alternative analysis suggests that the nominal particles do not function as clitics, but as phrasal affixes.^[12]
• 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)

See also[link]

References[link]