Clitics: An Introduction

Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics

by Andrew Spencer, Ana R. Luis

In most languages we find 'little words' which resemble a full word, but which cannot stand on their own. Instead they have to 'lean on' a neighbouring word, like the 'd, 've and unstressed 'em of Kim'd've helped'em ('Kim would have helped them'). These are clitics, and they are found in most of the world's languages. In English the clitic forms appear in the same place in the sentence that the full form of the word would appear in but in many languages clitics obey quite separate rules of placement. This book is the first introduction to clitics, providing a complete summary of their properties, their uses, the reasons why they are of interest to linguists and the various theoretical approaches that have been proposed for them. The book describes a whole host of clitic systems and presents data from over 100 languages.

Genres: Linguistics

369 pages, Paperback

First published July 12, 2012

Reviews

[Tarik Lahyany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was referred to this book to understand the difference between affixes, words, and clitics. This book indeed is an inclusive introduction into clitics. It takes clitics from syntactic, phonological, morphological, etc. perspectives and provide a general survey from a number of languages (related & unrelated). Necessary to note, still, is the fact that this book does not exclusively set out criteria to differentiate between clitics & affixes, even if some tests and properties are shown. It remains that each language, or language family, should has its own system of criteria developed out of a careful study of its cliticization system in general, and morphosyntactic & phonological system in particular.

What holds as valid tests in Spanish, English, Tagalog, Russian, etc, would not count in Turkish or Bantu, and vice versa. Clitic doubling is an observable phenomenon in Spanish, but French does not licence its occurences. In the light of this, the linguist, as the authors points out to, should be aware of the language under study first. Developing tests/criteria to distinguish between clitics & affixes requires sharp scrutiny of a large corpus with different morphosyntactic and phonological variation.

With this said, however, this perspective does not support any thread of denying the possibility of distinguishing between clitics & affixes. Clitics are syntactic atoms, phrasal in another sense, but affixes are morphological elements. Clitics also can be stranded of their hosts, whereas affixes cannot. They always follows their stems during movement. Fincally, clitics have selectional and categorial properties, unlike affixes. I believe these three criteria are universal (to a great extent), but stilll exceptions exist.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew Spencer and Ana R. Luis here give us a detailed introduction to clitics, that class of words which need another word to "lean" on and cannot stand on their own, and come with complex phonological and syntactic rules different from other words in a language. Like most entries in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series, it assumes a rigorous background in general linguistics, as well as a readiness to read difficult theoretical work, but assuming those prerequisites are met, it is pretty accessible and enjoyable.

In their survey of clitics as a general phenomenon, the authors mainly refer to Balkan Slavic, Albanian, Greek or Romance languages, as these are both heavily studied and more familiar to Western readers, but they also present examples from languages further afield. That attention paid to Balkan Slavic (Serbian/Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian) was very informative for this reader; I assumed that these particular languages all worked the same syntactically, but the authors point out some key differences in their clitics systems.

The curious thing about this textbook is that its subject is gradually shown not to exist! The authors start off with earlier accounts of clitics as a distinct class (basing themselves on e.g. Pullum's classic article), but as they go on they note how "clitics" and "affixes" can overlap, and ultimately cannot be separated. The second half of the textbook is the most theoretical, as the authors show how approaches like Optimality Theory deal with these issues.

I must admit that my interest waned in the second half of the book -- I'm more interested in individual languages and diachronic issues than overarching theoretical debates. But it's a good thing that the author's structured this in such a way that everyone can enjoy the first half of the book regardless of their interests.