A Handbook of Slavic Clitics (review)

Although clitics have lately been attracting increasing attention from linguists, the rich clitic phenomena found in Slavic have received but scant attention when compared to the extensive work done on Romance languages. In writing this book, which is far more than simply a descriptive reference guide to Slavic clitics, Steven Franks and Tracy Holloway King definitively fill this gap.

The authors’ threefold purpose serves as the basis for the book’s tripartite division. Part 1 is intended as a comprehensive, example-rich reference to Slavic clitic phenomena and is arranged according to family subgroup and individual language. It begins with a general overview (Ch. 1) of the types of clitics found in Slavic. Ch. 2 describes South Slavic (Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Bulgarian); Ch. 3, West Slavic (Czech, Slovak, Polish, Sorbian); and Ch. 4, East Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian). The data are accurate, nicely presented, and clearly explained. No topic is left uncovered, though the existence of cliticized interjections and other discourse particles (such as the Russian intensifier zhe) are merely noted in passing since they exhibit few typologically interesting properties. Because the discussion includes an appropriately detailed explanation of each linguistic term at the place of first mention, the South Slavic chapter is the longest, with successively less space devoted to West and East Slavic. This order is felicitous, however, because South and West Slavic contain the richest variety of clitic phenomena while East Slavic (with the exception of some western varieties of Ukrainian) lacks the pronominal clitic clusters so richly represented in the other two branches. Otherwise, the treatment of each language is as uniform as it is comprehensive. Readers interested in a broader survey of related syntactic phenomena, or who seek additional data on minor or extinct Slavic languages and dialects, are referred to the excellent The Slavonic languages (ed. by Bernard Comrie and Greville Corbett, London: Routledge, 1993) from which a fair number of the present volume’s examples derive.

Part 2, ‘Selected problems’, focuses on five specific aspects of Slavic clitics of special theoretical interest: clitic ordering patterns within the clitic cluster (Ch. 5); cross-linguistic variation in the positioning of these clusters (Ch. 6); the phenomenon of clitic doubling in Bulgarian and Macedonian (Ch. 7); the prosodic patterning of interrogative, modal, and negation-related clitics (Ch. 8); and the behavior of noun phrase clitics and a few other nonclausal domain clitics. These chapters summarize and generalize the referential descriptions presented in the first part of the book and prepare the reader for the more theoretical discussion to come.

Part 3 is the book’s intellectual and analytical core. Ch. 10 surveys recent theoretical treatments of Slavic clitic phenomena (much of it unpublished or published in venues not easily accessible to the general linguist). Ch. 11 supports an approach to Slavic clitics that invariably introduces them as functional heads. Ch. 12 investigates a few so-called ‘last-resort phenomena’: the placement of interrogative li, Serbo-Croatian’s apparent splitting of maximal projections, and hosting of clitics by the verb. Ch. 13 provides a brief overview and summary of the book’s three main conclusions: (1) Clitics in Slavic are functional heads; (2) cross-linguistic variation derives from lexical differences between the various Slavic languages, and (3) any well-formed structure involving Slavic clitics must satisfy both syntactic and prosodic requirements.

This volume makes the rich array of Slavic clitic data accessible to the general linguist for the first time while simultaneously presenting the Slavicist with a succinct and readable account of the most relevant recent theoretical approaches to clitics. Providing a complete and accessible account of Slavic clitics, it can only better inform future typological surveys of clitic phenomena in general.