4 - Clitics and phonology

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter we look in more detail at the phonological properties of clitics. For many linguists the most important feature of clitics is the fact that they can't exist as autonomous words because they lack inherent stress, and therefore need a host (with stress) to ‘lean on’ phonologically. While this is an important aspect of clitichood, it can't be a defining property, otherwise we would never be able to define clitics in languages that lack a stress system. In Section 4.2 we therefore generalize the idea of ‘lacking inherent stress’ to ‘lacking inherent prosodic prominence’. This means that we can define clitics in languages that have a tone system or an accent system but no stress system, for instance, Japanese.

In Section 4.3 we see how the placement of a clitic cluster is often a complex interaction of syntax, prosody and morphology, but in at least one familiar system, that of Pashto, it seems that it is just prosody that determines the placement. Another question arises with regard to the internal structure of the clitic cluster. In Bulgarian the stress of the host interacts in rather complex ways with the organization of the cluster.

Here we should anticipate arguments we will be advancing later in the book about a number of well-known clitic systems. It is frequently claimed that the Romance languages, Greek, Albanian and Macedonian have clitic systems (especially pronominal clitics). In these languages the pronominal elements attach to a verb form (either the lexical verb or an auxiliary verb). In Section 4.4 we will show that in some cases the pronominals appear to violate the normal stress pattern of the language, while in other cases they appear to be incorporated into the stress domain of the verb. Where the pronominal appears to be incorporated into the lexical stress domain, it thereby takes on some of the characteristics of an affix, whereas if it remains outside the normal domain of lexical stress, it is easier to treat it as different from an affix, i.e., as a clitic.