Clitics in Word Grammar

Abstract

Clitics are a challenge for any view of the architecture of grammar because they straddle the boundaries between words and morphemes and between syntax and morphology. The paper shows that clitics are syntactic words which also serve as word-parts, so their presence is explained in terms of syntactic dependencies, but their position follows morphological rules. The general analytical framework which is proposed builds on the theory of Word Grammar. As expected, clitics do demand a collection of special analytical categories- the word-classes Clitic and Hostword, and the relationships ‘host’, ‘clitic’, ‘finite verb ’ and ‘extension ’- but (unlike other current theories of cliticization) they do not need any extra theoretical apparatus. The paper considers simple clitics in English and special clitics in French and Serbo-Croat. 1 The Resources of Word Grammar The aim of this paper is to show that clitics (defined in section 2 below) can be accommodated in a grammatical framework such as Word Grammar (WG 1) which offers the following austere analytical apparatus: The word is the only unit of syntax, with phrases treated as epiphenomena; this is typical of dependency analysis but conflicts with phrase structure, and rules out any analysis which involves: • rebracketing (Sproat 1988) for the simple reason that there are no brackets (or anything equivalent); This paper arose out of a discussion with Amela Camdzic, who asked what WG has to say about clitics. I should like to thank her for stimulating discussion, and Chet Creider for comments on an earlier version.

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