clitic
Sign in to saveIn morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic") 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. 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.
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Article
26 sectionsContents
- Classification
- Proclitic
- Enclitic
- Endoclitic
- Mesoclitic
- Distinction
- Simple clitics
- Special clitics
- Properties
- Comparison with affixes
- Comparison with words
- Word order<!--'Wackernagel's Law' and 'Wackernagel's law' redirect here-->
- Indo-European languages
- Germanic languages
- English
- Other Germanic languages
- Celtic languages
- Romance languages
- Proto-Indo-European
- Slavic languages
- Serbo-Croatian
- Other languages
- See also
- References
- Further reading
- External links
In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic") 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. 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 , meaning "and").