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Clitics straddle the boundary between words and affixes because they have some properties of each. Therefore clitics pose a quandary for the longstanding division of labor in grammar between syntax and morphology. Clitics can be found in nearly every language; however, they may be hard to recognize, because they may be disguised as contracted forms, for instance. Clitics also exhibit some unique properties that have been especially difficult to account for in grammar. For that reason, they help linguists to reformulate hypotheses about the grammatical structure that underlines language (Nevis 2000).
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1. Illustration Of Clitics
Grammatical analysis offers a basic distinction between words and affixes: words are independent elements used for phrase and sentence formation, whereas affixes are word-building units that attach to roots and stems. Problematic for this division are two sorts of objects: those that form phrases but are not fully independent, and those that help to build words but exhibit a loose attachment that typical affixes do not. Both kinds have been labeled clitics, a term derived from Ancient Greek enklitikon ‘leaning on a previous (word),’ which in various guises has been used in grammatical description for two millennia.
As an illustration of clitics, consider English contracted forms, such as ’ e in you’ e. It lacks the independence of ha e, but otherwise acts like a full verb by helping to form sentences and by showing agreement with the subject. If ’ e is a verb, then it is a verb pronounced without a vowel (since the e is silent here)—can a word in English consist of a single pronounced consonant? While most contractions in English and in other languages qualify as clitics, not all do.
A different sort of example is the English possessive ’s, and Jespersen 1922). Unlike other affixes in English, it attaches to an entire phrase, as in the King of Morocco’s death, where the ’s is affixed to the phrase the King of Morocco rather than just to the word Morocco (that is, this is not Morocco’s death). If ’s is to be treated as an affix, then grammarians will have to adopt an expanded view of affixation that includes such phrasal affixes.
The study of clitics is important because their position on the edge of the word affix distinction sheds light on the complexities involved in determining how languages are constructed. The passage in Sect. 3 below will survey some of the unique properties attributed to clitics that have forced linguists to accommodate new facts into their theories of grammar.
2. Types Of Clitics
Clitics have traditionally been cited according to the way they attach: they may be enclitics (attaching leftward onto a host), proclitics (attaching rightward), or endoclitics (attaching inside the host). In Spanish me ‘me’ illustrates both the enclitic and the proclitic options: when me follows its host word, as in dıga-me ‘tell me,’ it functions as an enclitic, but when it precedes the host as in no me dıga ‘don’t tell me’ it is a proclitic. Most scholars assume that clitics attach in a very loose fashion to their hosts, and therefore must occur outside of regular affixes. Following that reasoning, proclitics precede any and all prefixes, and enclitics follow all suffixes. Endoclitics are so rare—if they exist at all—that specialists have examined any putative cases closely to see whether the positing of endoclitics can be avoided altogether.
In technical descriptions of languages, a category ‘clitic’ remained commonplace throughout the twentieth century, but seldom had it been incorporated into grammatical theories until the 1970s, when the phenomenon was surveyed by Zwicky (1977). Zwicky’s early investigations established three types of clitics: simple clitics, special clitics, and bound words. In later work, bound words and special clitics merged, producing two categories: simple and special clitics.
Simple clitics can be substituted for full words. The simple clitic is thus considered a reduced version of an independent word, sharing its meaning and manifesting a similar pronounciation. An example is the pronoun them in a sentence like we like them, which is often reduced in casual speech to we like ’em. The clitic form ’em is relatable to full form them and the clitic’s distribution in a sentence is a subset of the distribution of the full word, with the contraction occuring in most places the nonclitic is found, but when the pronoun occurs under emphasis or in isolation, clitic ’em is not permitted and the full form is used. For example, in response to the question Who do you like better, us or them?, the full word them is an acceptable answer, but the contraction ’em is not. Although simple clitics might be related to their free forms, they are not mere reductions due to fast speech: in this regard note that the English simple clitics like ’em are used in slow speech as well.
Special clitics, on the other hand, either lack a freeform equivalent or show some special syntax (to be discussed in the next section). The English possessive ’s lacks a nonclitic alternative, therefore it constitutes a special clitic. As illustrated below, the Tagalog pronouns are restricted to the second position of the sentence, so they constitute special clitics in Zwicky’s scheme.
3. Unique Properties Of Clitics
Accommodating clitics in theories of grammar has proven challenging. Initial investigations into clitics focused on their status in between words and affixes and pondered whether the notion clitic should be viewed as a special unit of grammar (distinct from the affix and the word) or as a sort of deviant affix or deviant word. Although early views opted for separate treatment, the debate persevered through the 1990s, with some scholars arguing for affixal status and others for word status. Positing the clitic as a unit distinct from the word and the affix has led scholars to attribute to it a special set of properties (Zwicky 1977, Spencer 1991, Katamba 1993). Usually the main thrust of this approach is to present a scheme locating and attaching the clitic in the appropriate place in a phrase and attaching the clitic to one of two neighbors.
Unique characteristics such as clitic doubling and special syntax have been claimed to be shared with neither affixes nor words. Such special properties help highlight differences between clitics on the one hand and words or affixes on the other, or to enrich linguists’ understanding of the syntactic patterns of pronouns and other word classes. Some unique properties are particular to clitic pronouns, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century many scholars have devoted their efforts to the study of these aspects of clitic pronouns. In particular, the clitic pronouns in Spanish and French have attracted considerable attention because the pronouns may occur in places where regular nouns may not. French and Spanish direct objects follow the verb if they are noun phrases (in French tu as vu le chien ‘you have seen the dog’) whereas they precede the verb if they are pronouns (tu l’as vu ‘you have seen it,’ literally you it have seen). There are other differences as well (van Riemsdijk 1999).
Clitic doubling occurs when a pronoun appears in the same clause as the noun phrase to which it refers. For example, in certain South American Spanish varieties, the proclitic pronoun lo can be found together with the direct object:
Lo vimos a Juan
Him saw to Juan
‘We saw John’
Normally pronouns replace noun phrases rather than repeat them, so this behavior is noteworthy.
Another pattern unique to clitics is Wackernagel’s Law, which refers to the restriction of elements to a slot immediately after the first unit of a phrase or clause; that initial unit can be a phrase or word (Steele 1977, Nevis et al. 1994). An example of Wackernagel clitics comes from Tagalog. In Tagalog, pronouns and certain adverbs must occur after the first word or phrase of the sentence. Usually this is the verb, but it can also be the negative hindi or some other word. The following sentences offer several clitic pronouns and particle clitics (na ‘already,’ lamang ‘only,’ and politeness marker po; such ‘particle clitics’ function as adverbs in Tagalog), which are highlighted to indicate the second position in the sentence.
Nakita ko na siya
Seen I already her him
I have already seen her him’
Hindi ka niya kapatid
Not you his her sibling
‘You aren’t his her sibling’
Tatlo lamang po sila
Three only POLITE them
‘There are only three of them’
The Tagalog clitics must remain in the second slot in the sentence, no matter what comes before them (verb, negative, or numeral).
4. Clitics vs. Leaners
Studies on clitic elements must establish that the objects under investigation exhibit mixed status be-tween affixes and words. Diagnostic tests can be used to identify properties of clitics, words and affixes (Zwicky 1977). Because the phonological attachment of a clitic to its host cannot be assumed and must be proved, it is important to distinguish clitics from leaners (also called quasiclitics or semiclitics), which are simply unstressed words. Although clitics also usually lack stress, they nevertheless show clear evidence of being part of a word’s pronunciation. By contrast, a leaner is merely unstressed and does not become part of another word’s pronunciation.
For example, the contraction of English is to ’s entails a change in pronunciation according to the last sound of the word it attaches to. Accordingly it is pronounced z at the end of dog but s after cat:
The dog’s barking.
The cat’s purring.
This is the behavior of the plural suffixes as well, which has two pronunciations, z and s, under the same conditions as the contracted form of is:
The dogs are barking.
The cats are purring.
Thus, contracted ’s, which is a clitic, and plural s, which is a suffix, share a pattern of pronunciation that depends crucially on the last sound of a word. This fact of pronunciation distinguishes clitic ’s from a word that is merely unstressed, as demonstrated by the pronunciation of the word who when used to introduce a relative clause (e.g., the one who got elected )—it is usually pronounced with a reduced vowel in casual conversation (that is, more like huh and not with full vowel u). Here unstressed who is considered a leaner rather than a clitic because it does not attach phono-logically to a neighboring word as does contracted ’s.
It is not always easy to decide what is a clitic and what is not. When speakers contract want to to wanna, investigators determine whether wanna can be derived in a principled way from want plus to using regular rules of grammar. It it can, then wanna may contain a clitic form of to. However, if additional rules are needed to handle this case in an idiosyncratic way, then the derivation is not considered valid and wanna might instead be considered a single indivisible word rather than a composite of want and to. In English, wanna is not just a matter of fast speech reduction because it can convey a difference in meaning from the sequence want plus to: a sentence like Tung Chee-hwa I want to succeed offers two meanings (I want Tung Chee-hwa to succeed and I want to succeed Tung Chee-hwa), whereas the sentence Tung Chee-hwa I wanna succeed is restricted for most speakers to one meaning (I want to succeed Tung Chee-hwa) and resists the other interpretation.
5. Clitics As Derived Words And Phrasal Affixes
Many of the scholars researching clitic doubling, and to a certain extent Wackernagel’s Law, seem to assume that clitics are wordlike in nature. A number of studies treat clitics as derived words. But even if most clitics are analyzable as derived words, there is nevertheless a small residue of clitics that are better handled as affixes. English possessive ’s is an example of one such clitic: it is best treated as an affix attaching not to any individual word but to a group of words insofar as it offers no wordlike characteristics beyond phrasal affiliation and clearly patterns with the other inflec-tional affixes of English in morphology and pronunciation. To the chagrin of theoreticians, both kinds of clitics appear to be required to handle such puzzles as the wordlike contracted auxiliaries of English (e.g.,’ e) and its phrasal affix possessive.
Clitics can sometimes cluster into longer sequences. These sequences exhibit looser order than affix chains but stricter order than word order is generally capable of. In Tagalog, for example, all pronoun clitics consisting of a single syllable precede all particle clitics, which in turn precede all pronoun clitics consisting of two syllables (e.g., ko ‘I’ precedes na ‘already,’ and na precedes siya ‘her him.’
Nakita ko na siya
Seen I already her him
‘I have already seen her him’
But among the two-syllable pronouns order is not restricted; nila ‘they’ and ako ‘me’ may occur in either order:
Hindi nila ako nakita=Hindi ako nila nakita
Not they me seen
‘They didn’t see me’
Similarly, order need not be limited among the particle clitics; lamang ‘only’ and the politeness marker po occur in two orders as well.
Tatlo lamang po sila=Tatlo po lamang sila
Three only POLITE them
‘There are only three of them’
Surprisingly, such clitic sequences have been used to argue for the more wordlike standing of clitics, for the affixal nature of clitics, and for the unique status of clitics. Clearly more work needs to be done in this area.
6. Clitics In Historical Studies
In the 1980s and 1990s the focus was on accommodating clitics into current theories of grammar, but previously to this most investigations of clitics had scrutinized historical change and the development of affixes from separate words. Affixes can arise from several sources historically; one such source is a former word. A word can become less stressed, begin to lean on a neighboring word, and eventually turn into a fully dependent element. This is known as the agglutination cycle. For instance, the Modern English adjective suffix ly developed from a Germanic word that also yielded Modern English like. One hypothesis is that full words first cliticize before becoming affixes, as demonstrated in the nearly extinct Balto-Finnic language Livonian, which has a comitative suffix -ks meaning ‘with’ (e.g., suu-ks ‘with the mouth’) that came from a former word kansa ‘with’ (that is, this word would originally have been the phrase *suun kansa, literally ‘mouth with’), which cliticized into -kas before becoming suffix -ks. How-ever, it is by no means evident that cliticization is a necessary stage in the development of affixes from words.
Another question is whether the agglutination cycle operates in one direction only. Normally a word weakens into a clitic, and then the clitic fuses as an affix into the host. For example, German dem ‘the’ has fused with zu ‘to’ to form zum ‘to the.’ So if the agglutination cycle is limited to one direction of development (that is, it is unidirectional), then affix sequencing might be a good indication of an earlier word order. Since the affixes would have been separate words previously, they could provide a tool for linguistic rconstruction of word order patterns in earlier stages of a language.
But exceptions to this scenario have been noted. An affix can loosen and can become a clitic, and a clitic can likewise become a separate word. The modern English possessive is a case in point because it is a clitic derived from a regular suffix in old English. Older English exhibited attachment of the possessive to the head noun in a phrase (as is expected of an affix) rather than to the end of the phrase (as a phrasal-affix type clitic):
Earlier: The King’s crown of England
Now: The King of England’s crown
An illustration of a clitic turning into a word can be found in the Sami languages (formerly called Lappish), where the original abessive ending developed first into a clitic and then in some varieties of Sami into a separate word. The abessive expresses absence (and is translated as ‘without’). In Northern Sami, the abessive is an enclitic on a preceding noun (e.g., airojtaga ‘without oars’), whereas in the Enontekio subdialect it has become an independent adverb, standing even without a preceding noun:
Mun bahcen taga
I go without
‘I do without’
Clitics may play a role in word order change. When verbal clitics are attracted to the second position, the Wackernagel slot, that pattern may be generalized to other, nonclitic verbs. If a language had originally placed verbs at the end of a sentence, generalizing this second position pattern would cause verbs to migrate to second position. That is, a subject–object–verb pattern will become subject–verb–object. Although the details of this proposal may not be widely accepted, it demonstrates that the role of clitics should not be ignored in the study of word order change.
7. Conclusion
Most, if not all, languages offer at least one clitic element. However clitics themselves do not seem to form a homogeneous class, as illustrated in English by the rather wordlike contracted auxiliary ’ e and the more affixal possessive ’s. Clitics cross-cut most word classes and may appear as adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, auxi-liary verbs, and the like. Apparently, the only word classes inaccessible to clitics are nouns and verbs, as well as adjectives (and this is because putative ‘clitic nouns’ and ‘clitic verbs’ would be treated separately as incorporations).
Apart from the historical studies, much of the literature on clitics in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century was pretheoretical in nature insofar as investigators struggled to understand the fundamentals of what a clitic is. Subsequent debates were often couched in particular theoretical frameworks or focused exclusively on certain kinds of clitics (especially pronominal clitics). Although numerous generalizations have been established, no real consensus had resulted in a single theory of clitics by the end of the twentieth century—probably because clitic phenomena do not constitute a uniform phenomenon. To supplement such argumentation, future research on clitics will have to incorporate evidence from areas such as psycholinguistic experimentation and language disorders as well as acquisition of language, and will have to better integrate studies on the historical evolution of clitics. But above all, the study of clitics will continue to assist scholars in defining and delimiting related areas such as Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax).
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