5 - Clitics and morphology

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter we look at morphological aspects of clitics. There are two aspects to this. First, all investigators are agreed that in many of those constructions that are conventionally labelled as clitic systems the clitics themselves behave like affixes, morphological elements, rather than words. We therefore need to survey these morphological modes of behaviour. We'll start by summarizing a celebrated and still important set of criteria for distinguishing clitics from affixes (what in future we will simply refer to as the ‘Zwicky–Pullum criteria’). Applied to the English negation ‘clitic’ n't, these criteria yield a perhaps surprising conclusion. We then return to a phenomenon briefly introduced in Chapter 3, the clitic cluster. We will find that within the cluster the clitics behave much more like affixes than anything else, no matter how they might behave as a cluster. To set the scene for that demonstration we briefly survey the behaviour of uncontroversial affixes in the verb forms of Classical Nahuatl. We then turn to a more controversial issue. When we speak of clitics as phrasal affixes, we are thinking of a clitic as a morphological object (an affix) that happens to be attached to whatever happens to come at the edge of a phrase, rather than a true affix which seeks out a particular type of word within the phrase. Now, given current approaches to morphology, there are two ways of thinking of affixation. We can treat it in the manner of classical structuralist linguistics and regard it as essentially the addition of a morpheme to another string of morphemes.