Clitics in Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax (review)

The status and nature of clitics have been and continue to be a vibrant area of linguistic research, with many fundamental questions still unresolved: Are they arguments or functional heads? Is their placement phonologically or syntactically driven, or both? Are they attached to lexical words or prosodic phrases? Do they move to their surface position or are they base-generated there? What lies behind the strict ordering that is usually found within clitic clusters? These and many other matters are addressed from a wide range of perspectives in the fourteen articles in this collection that grew out of a workshop held at the 1999 meeting of the German Society of Linguistics in Konstanz. Everyone interested in clitics would do well to acquaint themselves with this highly diverse volume that draws on a variety of crosslinguistic data.

Birgit Gerlach and Janet Grijzenhout examine clitics from various perspectives, conclude that they are affixes attached to phonological phrases, and favor seeing them as base-generated in their surface position. Akinbiyi Akinlabi and Mark Liberman investigate the tonal behavior of six types of enclitics in Yoruba and discuss five devices employed to avoid violations of a constraint against the final syllable of the host and the clitic possessing the same tone. Artemis Alexiadou and Melita Stavrou employ evidence provided by possessive clitics in Greek to propose that there are two possessor positions within the DP. Gloria Cocchi uses a clitic shell framework to claim that Romance pronominal clitics and Bantu bound personal affixes are both best analyzed as arguments of the verb rather than as agreement markers.

Berthold Crysmann proposes that pronominal clitics in European Portuguese should be regarded as morphosyntactic hybrids within an HPSG framework. Linda Escobar and Anna Gavarró provide experimental evidence on differences in the acquisition of strong vs. clitic pronominals in Catalan to test whether binding is innate. Antony Dubach Green demonstrates that, while proclitics are normally attached outside of the prosodic word of the host in Irish, various phonological processes can cause all or part of the clitic to be incorporated into the host’s prosodic word.

In three papers on Romanian, Géraldine Legendre provides an OT account which argues that auxiliary and pronominal clitics are phrasal affixes subject to conflicting PF alignment constraints that delineate their positioning; Paola Monachesi employs an HPSG framework to argue that pronominal and intensive clitics are morphological affixes but that auxiliary and negative clitics are words subject to syntactic processes; and Albert Ortmann and Alexandra Popescu propose that the postposed definite article is an inflectional suffix and extend their analysis to Albanian and Bulgarian.

Donald F. Reindl and Steven Franks use OT constraints to model a metrical module which is superimposed over the normal system to account for features of clitics in Serbian folk songs that are otherwise ungrammatical. Andrew Spencer uses the framework of paradigm function morphology to treat Bulgarian clitics as phrasal affixes and to account for their fixed order and extends his analysis to Macedonian. Olga Miŝeska Tomić identifies two classes of clitics in Macedonian—pronominal and auxiliary clitics are inflectional; negative and interrogative wh-clitics are operators—and examines the variable positioning of clitic clusters. Finally, Juan Uriagereka explores a possible correlation between clitic doubling in languages such as Spanish and the semantics of inalienable possession within the framework of the minimalist program.