8 - Approaches to clitics

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter we briefly survey a number of theoretical approaches to clitics. As we mentioned in our Introduction to the book, we will not discuss any specific model of morphosyntax in any detail. Rather, we will sketch the kinds of issues that the most popular theoretical approaches address and outline the ways in which those models deal with those issues in the form of a highly selective annotated bibliography.

We should point out that it is a little difficult to provide an exhaustive or completely coherent ‘typology’ of theoretical approaches to the problem of clitics. In part this is because different authors sometimes mean different things by ‘clitic’, so that the empirical bases are not always comparable. In part the difficulty is that a number of approaches adopt several different perspectives on clitics, treating them as properties of the interface between phonology, morphology and syntax (what Franks and King 2000 refer to as ‘mixed approaches’). Finally, it is not entirely straightforward to identify a particular kind of approach with a particular theoretical model of grammar. This is particularly true where theorists deploy the machinery of Optimality Theory (OT). The OT approach can, in principle, be integrated with any of the major theoretical models of grammar, and it has particularly been applied to the Principles and Parameters model (Grimshaw 1997, 2001) and to the Lexical Functional Grammar model (Kuhn 2001, Bresnan 1998, 2001a), though not to Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG).