3 - Types of clitic system

Summary

Introduction

Scholars from diverse linguistic traditions have observed that the behaviour of clitics is neither that of an independent word nor that of an affix, but enjoys what Klavans (1982) calls ‘dual citizenship’. Among the classical studies on clitic phenomena, two oft-cited and influential papers stand out, namely Wackernagel (1892) and Zwicky (1977). In Section 3.2 we offer a summary of these studies, which represent two early attempts at identifying and classifying the idiosyncrasies of clitic placement. Section 3.3 offers a descriptive overview of a number of well-documented (though not necessarily uncontroversial) placement patterns. Having surveyed the meaning and function of clitics in the previous chapter, we look in somewhat more detail at the distributional properties of clitics and the various positions within which clitics occur cross-linguistically. We first briefly introduce the notion of clitic cluster and then explore the way that clitics or clusters of clitics are positioned within their domain (the clause, the noun phrase, occasionally the verb phrase). Placement patterns vary significantly: while some clitics may show a strong preference for the second position in the clause, others are banned from the edge of the sentence, and yet others must be adjacent to a specific word category. We will also show that even a concept such as ‘second position’ can mean different things in different languages. Clitics very often express functional properties akin to (or even identical to) inflectional categories in a language, which in practice means inflectional properties of nouns and of verbs. A clitic's linear positioning usually associates it in some way with the noun or verb whose properties it expresses, and so the noun and verb serve to define domains for clitic placement. In Section 3.4 we examine these domains. On the other hand, a good many clitics express properties of entire clauses or, in the case of discourse clitics, of utterances. Section 3.5 is devoted to such clause-domain clitics.