In morphology and syntax, a clitic (backformed from Greek Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: ἐγκλιτικός "leaning" or "enclitic"[1]) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host.[2] A clitic is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the form of affixes, but the distribution of function words.
Clitics can belong to any grammatical category, although they are commonly pronouns, determiners, or adpositions. Note that orthography is not always a good guide for distinguishing clitics from affixes: clitics may be written as separate words, but sometimes they are joined to the word they depend on (like the Latin clitic Latin: -que, meaning "and") or separated by special characters such as hyphens or apostrophes (like the English clitic s in "it's" for "it has" or "it is").
Clitics fall into various categories depending on their position in relation to the word they connect to.
A proclitic appears before its host.
An enclitic appears after its host.
"Senate people-and Roman" = "The Senate and people of Rome"
tenerlo
"to have it"
ánthrōpoí (-te) theoí -te
"people (and) gods and" = "(both) men and gods"
naro gajaś-ca नरो गजश्च i.e. "naraḥ gajaḥ ca" नरस् गजस् -च with sandhi
"the man the elephant and" = "the man and the elephant"
"bowing to you"
Nevím, chtělo-li by se mi si to tam však také vyzkoušet.
"However (však), I do not know (nevím), if (-li) it would (by) want (chtělo se) to try (vyzkoušet si) it (to) to me (mi) there (tam) as well (také)." (= However, I'm not sure if I would like to try it there as well.)
idu eṉ pū = இது என் பூ (This is my flower). With enclitic -vē, which indicates certainty, this sentence becomes
idu eṉ pūvē = இது என் பூவே (This is certainly my flower)
idi nā puvvu = ఇది నా పువ్వు (This is my flower). With enclitic -ē, which indicates certainty, this sentence becomes
Idi nā puvvē = ఇది నా పువ్వే (This is certainly my flower)
Rahagagi vaene means "Poor even having money". Enclitic -gi with the comitative case turns "with/having something" into "even with/having something". Without the enclitic, the saying would be "rahaga vaene", which would mean that the predicate is "poor, but has money" (compared to "poor even having money", having money won't make a difference if the predicate is poor or not).
Some authors postulate endoclitics, which split a stem and are inserted between the two elements. For example, they have been claimed to occur between the elements of bipartite verbs (equivalent to English verbs such as take part) in the Udi language.[3] Endoclitics have also been claimed for Pashto[4] and Degema.[5] However, other authors treat such forms as a sequence of clitics docked to the stem.[6]
One distinction drawn by some scholars divides the broad term "clitics" into two categories, simple clitics and special clitics.[7] This distinction is, however, disputed.[8]
Simple clitics are free morphemes: can stand alone in a phrase or sentence. They are unaccented and thus phonologically dependent upon a nearby word. They derive meaning only from that "host".
Special clitics are morphemes that are bound to the word upon which they depend: they exist as a part of their host. That form, which is unaccented, represents a variant of a free form that carries stress. Both variants carry similar meaning and phonological makeup, but the special clitic is bound to a host word and is unaccented.
Some clitics can be understood as elements undergoing a historical process of grammaticalization:[9]
lexical item → clitic → affix[10]
According to this model from Judith Klavans, an autonomous lexical item in a particular context loses the properties of a fully independent word over time and acquires the properties of a morphological affix (prefix, suffix, infix, etc.). At any intermediate stage of this evolutionary process, the element in question can be described as a "clitic". As a result, this term ends up being applied to a highly heterogeneous class of elements, presenting different combinations of word-like and affix-like properties.
Although the term "clitic" can be used descriptively to refer to any element whose grammatical status is somewhere in between a typical word and a typical affix, linguists have proposed various definitions of "clitic" as a technical term. One common approach is to treat clitics as words that are prosodically deficient: that, like affixes, they cannot appear without a host, and can only form an accentual unit in combination with their host. The term postlexical clitic is sometimes used for this sense of the term.[11]
Given this basic definition, further criteria are needed to establish a dividing line between clitics and affixes. There is no natural, clear-cut boundary between the two categories (since from a diachronic point of view, a given form can move gradually from one to the other by morphologization). However, by identifying clusters of observable properties that are associated with core examples of clitics on the one hand, and core examples of affixes on the other, one can pick out a battery of tests that provide an empirical foundation for a clitic-affix distinction.
An affix syntactically and phonologically attaches to a base morpheme of a limited part of speech, such as a verb, to form a new word. A clitic syntactically functions above the word level, on the phrase or clause level, and attaches only phonetically to the first, last, or only word in the phrase or clause, whichever part of speech the word belongs to.[12] The results of applying these criteria sometimes reveal that elements that have traditionally been called "clitics" actually have the status of affixes (e.g., the Romance pronominal clitics discussed below).
Zwicky and Pullum postulated five characteristics that distinguish clitics from affixes:
An example of differing analyses by different linguists is the discussion of the possessive marker ('s) in English. Some linguists treat it as an affix, while others treat it as a clitic.[13]
Similar to the discussion above, clitics must be distinguishable from words. Linguists have proposed a number of tests to differentiate between the two categories. Some tests, specifically, are based upon the understanding that when comparing the two, clitics resemble affixes, while words resemble syntactic phrases. Clitics and words resemble different categories, in the sense that they share certain properties. Six such tests are described below. These are not the only ways to differentiate between words and clitics.[14]
Clitics do not always appear next to the word or phrase that they are associated with grammatically. They may be subject to global word order constraints that act on the entire sentence. Many Indo-European languages, for example, obey Wackernagel's law (named after Jacob Wackernagel), which requires sentential clitics to appear in "second position", after the first syntactic phrase or the first stressed word in a clause:[15]
English enclitics include the contracted versions of auxiliary verbs, as in I'm and we've.[17] Some also regard the possessive marker, as in The Queen of England's crown as an enclitic, rather than a (phrasal) genitival inflection.[18]
Some consider the infinitive marker to and the English articles a, an, the to be proclitics.[19]
The negative marker -n't as in couldn't etc. is typically considered a clitic that developed from the lexical item not. Linguists Arnold Zwicky and Geoffrey Pullum argue, however, that the form has the properties of an affix rather than a syntactically independent clitic.[20]
The definite article was the enclitic Norse, Old: -inn, Norse, Old: -in, Norse, Old: -itt (masculine, feminine and neuter nominative singular), as in Norse, Old: álfrinn ("the elf"), Norse, Old: gjǫfin ("the gift"), and Norse, Old: tréit ("the tree"), an abbreviated form of the independent pronoun Norse, Old: hinn, cognate of the German pronoun German: jener. It was fully declined for gender, case and number. Since both the noun and enclitic were declined, this led to "double declension". The situation remains similar in modern Faroese and Icelandic, but in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, the enclitics have become endings. Old Norse had also some enclitics of personal pronouns that were attached to verbs. These were Norse, Old: -sk (from Norse, Old: sik), Norse, Old: -mk (from Norse, Old: mik), Norse, Old: -k (from Norse, Old: ek), and Norse, Old: -ðu / -du / -tu (from Norse, Old: þú). These could even be stacked up, e.g. Norse, Old: fásktu (Hávamál, stanza 116).
Dutch; Flemish: 't definite article of neuter nouns and third person singular neuter pronoun, Dutch; Flemish: 'k first person pronoun, Dutch; Flemish: je second person singular pronoun, Dutch; Flemish: ie third person masculine singular pronoun, Dutch; Flemish: ze third person plural pronoun
Sentence clitics appear in 2nd position in accordance with Wackernagel's Law, including Gothic: -u (yes–no question), Gothic: -uh ("and"), Gothic: þan ("then"), Gothic: ƕa ("anything"), for example Gothic: ab-'''u''' þus silbin ("of thyself?"). Multiple clitics could be stacked up, and split a preverb from its rest of the verb if the preverb comes at the beginning of the clause, e.g. Gothic: diz-'''uh-þan'''-sat ijōs ("and then he seized them (fem.)"), Gothic: ga-'''u-ƕa'''-sēƕi ("whether he saw anything").
The unspecified pronoun Yiddish: מען can be contracted to Yiddish: מ'.
In Cornish, the clitics ma / na are used after a noun and definite article to express "this" / "that" (singular) and "these" / "those" (plural). For example:
Irish Gaelic uses seo / sin as clitics in a similar way, also to express "this" / "that" and "these" / "those". For example:
In Romance languages, some have treated the object personal pronoun forms as clitics, though they only attach to the verb they are the object of and so are affixes by the definition used here.[6] [21] There is no general agreement on the issue.[22] For the Spanish object pronouns, for example:
Portuguese allows object suffixes before the conditional and future suffixes of the verbs:[23]
Colloquial Portuguese allows ser to be conjugated as a verbal clitic adverbial adjunct to emphasize the importance of the phrase compared to its context, or with the meaning of "really" or "in truth":[24]
Note that this clitic form is only for the verb ser and is restricted to only third-person singular conjugations. It is not used as a verb in the grammar of the sentence but introduces prepositional phrases and adds emphasis. It does not need to concord with the tense of the main verb, as in the second example, and can be usually removed from the sentence without affecting the simple meaning.
In the Indo-European languages, some clitics can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European: for example, * is the original form of Sanskrit च (-ca), Greek τε (-te), and Latin -que.
ли (yes–no question), же (emphasis), то (emphasis), не "not" (proclitic), бы (subjunctive)
the reflexive pronoun forms si and se, li (yes–no question), unstressed present and aorist tense forms of biti ("to be"; sam, si, je, smo, ste, su; and bih, bi, bi, bismo, biste, bi, for the respective tense), unstressed personal pronouns in genitive (me, te, ga, je, nas, vas, ih), dative (mi, ti, mu, joj, nam, vam, im) and accusative (me, te, ga (nj), je (ju), nas, vas, ih), and unstressed present tense of htjeti ("want/will"; ću, ćeš, će, ćemo, ćete, će)
These clitics follow the first stressed word in the sentence or clause in most cases, which may have been inherited from Proto-Indo-European (see Wackernagel's Law), even though many of the modern clitics became cliticised much more recently in the language (e.g. auxiliary verbs or the accusative forms of pronouns). In subordinate clauses and questions, they follow the connector and/or the question word respectively.
Examples (clitics – sam "I am", biste "you would (pl.)", mi "to me", vam "to you (pl.)", ih "them"):
In certain rural dialects this rule is (or was until recently) very strict, whereas elsewhere various exceptions occur. These include phrases containing conjunctions (e. g. Ivan i Ana "Ivan and Ana"), nouns with a genitival attribute (e. g. vrh brda "the top of the hill"), proper names and titles and the like (e. g. (gospođa) Ivana Marić "(Mrs) Ivana Marić", grad Zagreb "the city (of) Zagreb"), and in many local varieties clitics are hardly ever inserted into any phrases (e. g. moj najbolji prijatelj "my best friend", sutra ujutro "tomorrow morning"). In cases like these, clitics normally follow the initial phrase, although some Standard grammar handbooks recommend that they should be placed immediately after the verb (many native speakers find this unnatural).
Examples:
Clitics are however never inserted after the negative particle ne, which always precedes the verb in Serbo-Croatian, or after prefixes (earlier preverbs), and the interrogative particle li always immediately follows the verb. Colloquial interrogative particles such as da li, dal, jel appear in sentence-initial position and are followed by clitics (if there are any).
Examples:
Suffixes standing for direct object pronouns and/or indirect object pronouns (as found in Indo-European languages) are suffixed to verbs, possessive determiners are suffixed to nouns, and pronouns are suffixed to particles.
Many Australian languages use bound pronoun enclitics to mark inanimate arguments and, in many pro-drop languages like Warlpiri, animate arguments as well. Pronominal enclitics may also mark possession and other less common argument structures like causal and reciprocal arguments (see Pintupi[25]). In some Australian languages, case markers also seem to operate like special clitics since they are distributed at the phrasal instead of word level (indeed, clitics have been referred to as "phrasal affixes"[26]) see for example in Wangkatja.[27]
Finnish has seven clitics, which change according to the vowel harmony: -kO (-ko ~ -kö), -kA (-ka ~ -kä), -kin, -kAAn (-kaan ~ -kään), -pA (-pa ~ -pä), -hAn (-han ~ -hän) and -s. One word can have multiple clitics attached to it: onkohan? "I wonder if it is?"
-nga attached to a verb to form the progressive; -wo 'in' (also attached to a verb)
-o (2nd and 3rd person speakers) and -metki (1st person speakers) is added to the end of a sentence to show reported speech. Examples: K'atsma miutxra, xval gnaxe-o = The man told me that he would see you tomorrow (Literally, "The man told me, tomorrow I see you [reported]") vs. K'atss vutxari, xval gnaxe-metki = I told the man that I would see you tomorrow (Literally, "To man I told, tomorrow I see you [first person reported]).
the marker of indirect questions is -e: Nem tudja még, jön-e. "He doesn't know yet if he'll come." This clitic can also mark direct questions with a falling intonation. Is ("as well") and se ("not... either") also function as clitics: although written separately, they are pronounced together with the preceding word, without stress: Ő is jön. "He'll come too." Ő sem jön. "He won't come, either."
The copula 이다 (ida) and the adjectival 하다 (hada), as well as some nominal and verbal particles (e.g. 는, neun).[28] However, alternative analysis suggests that the nominal particles do not function as clitics, but as phrasal affixes.[29]
pronominal clitics, either subject or object clitics, are required in Somali. These exist as simple clitics postponed to the noun they apply to. Lexical arguments can be omitted from sentences, but pronominal clitics cannot be.[30]