LECTURE: CLITICS VS AFFIXES
John D. Alderete, Linguistics 323, Simon Fraser University
Goals: this lecture is designed to provide descriptive and analytical tools for clitics. In
particular, it reviews a set of diagnostics that distinguish free versus bound word forms,
and affixes versus clitics, a morphological category that is intermediate between affixes
and free word-forms. It also supplements the theory of word syntax to include analyses of
clitics, and their special status as being prosodically bound yet having a limited syntactic
independence.
Key words: diagnosis for free versus bound word forms, diagnosis for affixes versus
clitics, word syntax for clitics, morpho-syntactic structure versus prosodic structure
Reading: Understanding Morphology 9.2, 9.3
PROBLEMS FOR WORD ANALYSIS
Illustration: joue-lé! ‘Play it!’, je le regarde ‘I watch it.’
Observation: in French, small words, called clitics, are affix-like in that they are counted
and stressed by the stress rules; but unlike affixes because of their sentence distribution.
Illustration: yo me llamo ‘My name is…’, díga=me=lo ‘Say it to me’
Observation: Spanish clitics have a similar freedom of placement, but they are not
counted by the stress rules (places stress on last three syllables).
Illustration: compound stress in góld-fìsh versus normal stress in gòld médal
Observation: In English, a sequence of Adjective + Noun seems to have different levels
of cohesion phonologically; main stress may include entire sequence or last word.
Questions: how does one tell if two morphemes are in the same word-form? How is this
formalized with word syntax or schemas?
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BOUND VERSUS FREE
A cluster of properties (UM 8.2)
Free forms
utterance interruptible at boundary
contrastively stressable
cleftable
topicalizable
coordinatable
separate domain of word stress
Bound forms (=affixes and clitics)
utterance un-interruptible at boundary
not contrastively stressable
not cleftable
not topicalizable
not coordinatable
not separate domain for word stress
Task: following the model given in UM: 150, show that the English suffix –s marking
third person singular of present-tense verbs is a bound morpheme.
AFFIX VERSUS CLITIC
Another cluster of properties (other properties omitted from UM)
Clitics
Affixes
freedom of movement
no freedom of movement
freedom of host selection
no freedom of host selection
less prosodically integrated
more prosodically integrated
Illustration: freedom on movement in Polish (analysis of UM 8.3)
a. Adverb = go Matrix Verb Verb Prep Noun
b. Adverb Matrix Verb go Verb Prep Noun
c. Adverb Matrix Verb Verb go Prep Noun
Observation: Polish clitic pronoun go can appear in several different sentence positions
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Illustration: freedom of host selection in Serbo-Croatian (UM 9.3)
a. Subject=je Verb Object
b. Verb=je Subject Object
c. Object=je Subject Verb
Observation: while restricted in position, je ‘has’ can attach to several different types of
host
Task: now use the above two diagnostics to show that the English suffix –s marking third
person singular of present-tense verbs is an affix and not a clitic.
Question: what analytical assumptions need to be made in order to account for freedom
of movement and host selection? Make this concrete by stating explicitly what
mechanisms restrict movement and host selection with English –s, then state what this
assumption entails for clitics.
MORPHOLOGICAL VERSUS PROSODIC STRUCTURE
Observation: as bound morphemes, clitics have a prosodic dependence on their host; but
as non-affixes, they are less integrated with their hosts.
Questions: if clitics have freedom of host selection, what do they select for? Also, what
does it mean to be less integrated into prosodic structure? You’re either in it or not, right?
Assumption: clitics are morphological structures, assigned structures by word-structure
rules. But they are also sensitive to prosodic structure, which is a different type of
structure that is aligned in language particular ways with morphological structure.
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Illustration: Spanish clitics (UM 9.3)
Verb stress: one of last three syllables of word
caminár ‘walk.INF’, camína ‘walk.Pres.3SG’, caminábamos ‘walk.PAST.1PL’
Clitics may push stress outside the three syllable window
díga=me=lo ‘Say it to me!’
Assumption: me and lo are outside the stress domain; otherwise, clitics cause exceptions.
Task: develop the necessary word structure rules to incorporate clitics into Spanish
words. Assume that inflections and derivational affixes are similar to English.
Question: how can this structure be used to exclude clitics from stress?
Illustration: French clitics
joue-lé! ‘Play it!’, je le regarde ‘I watch it.’
Observation: French clitic pronouns likewise enjoy freedom of movement, but they are
incorporated in the stress domain. Indeed, they are stressed, according to the general rule
of stressing the last syllable of a phrase.
Question: how can this be accounted for using the same basic word-structure rules as
Spanish, but different prosodic structures?
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