6 - Clitics and syntax

Summary

Introduction

This chapter will discuss various ways in which clitics interact with syntactic structure, in as theory-neutral a way as possible. This will involve examining the syntactic positions of clitics, the syntactic factors determining them and the syntactic role of clitics in phenomena such as agreement, doubling and climbing. We will see that behaviour generally associated with clitics, especially lack of ‘doubling’ of overt NP arguments and clitic climbing, can be found in otherwise canonical agreement systems. This sometimes has important consequences for theoretical models that attempt to deal with clitic systems.

Distributional idiosyncrasies

We will begin by surveying some of the peculiarities of function words that are not necessarily analysed in the literature as clitics, and which in any case are not special clitics. In Section 6.2.1 we look at properties that align ordinary function words with clitics, and in Section 6.2.2 we look at properties that align function words with affixes.

Clitic-like behaviour

In many cases we find that unaccented function words have properties that make them look more like clitics than full words. The most obvious such property is phonological: unaccented function words are phonological clitics, at least in languages with some sort of accentual system (for instance, word stress). However, there are other respects in which function words might resemble clitics more than lexical words. One very common instance of this concerns word order. In many languages the order of words within the clause or within, say, a noun phrase can be very free.