Clitics Spencer, Andrew; Luis, Ana R.
07/2012
eBook
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.
Defining the word Haspelmath, Martin
Word (Worcester),
07/2023, Volume:
69, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this paper, I propose a definition of the term word that can be applied to all languages using the same criteria. Roughly, a word is defined as a free morph or a clitic or a root plus affixes or a ...compound plus affixes. The paper relies on earlier definitions of the terms free, morph, affix, clitic, root, and compound, which are summarized here. I briefly compare the proposed definition with Bloomfield's, I note that it is a shared-core definition, and I say how word-forms differ from lexemes. In the final section, I explain why I think that an unnatural-seeming definition is better than a prototype definition or other options.
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The prosodic word (PW) has been proposed as a planning unit in speech production (Levelt et al. 1999. A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1-75), ...supported by evidence that speech initiation time (RT) is faster for Dutch utterances with fewer PWs due to cliticisation (with the number of lexical words and syllables kept constant) (Wheeldon & Lahiri 1997. Prosodic units in speech production. Journal of Memory and Language, 37(3), 356-381. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1997.2517, W&L). The present study examined prosodic cliticisation (and resulting RT) for a different set of potential clitics (articles, direct-object pronouns), in English, using a different response task (immediate reading aloud). W&L's result of shorter RTs for fewer PWs was replicated for articles, but not for pronouns, suggesting a difference in cliticisation for these two function word types. However, a post-hoc analysis of the duration of the verb preceding the clitic suggests that both are cliticised. These findings highlight the importance of supplementing production latency measures with phonetic duration measures to understand different stages of language production during utterance planning.
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This paper discusses language variation in heritage languages, focussing on a peculiar use of the dative clitic ghe in Brazilian Venetan, a heritage northern Italo-Romance variety. Corpus data and ...grammaticality judgments by native speakers showed that, unlike homeland varieties of Venetan, the clitic is used in doubling constructions with both indirect and direct objects. Conversely, accusative clitics do not appear in doubling constructions in Brazilian Venetan, but are limited to cases of resumption of dislocated constituents. This phenomenon is compared to a parallel use of dative clitics with direct objects in some previously described leísta varieties of Spanish. I will show that the type of variation attested in Brazilian Venetan accusative and dative clitics depends on different conditions on cliticisation of the two elements. Specifically, while accusative clitics are pronouns that undergo a morphological process of incorporation, dative clitics are merged as agreement markers on the finite verb. The analysis also captures a diachronic change in the distribution of dative clitics in the diachrony of Venetan.
Standard negation in Pangasinan comes in two forms, ag and aga. Benton's 1971 grammar of Pangasinan describes the aga form of negation as occurring specifically with third-singular pivot arguments, ...which if correct would constitute a typologically unusual instance of marked third-singular morphology. We argue against this characterization and instead propose that aga is an allomorph of ag historically motivated by a disyllabic word minimum requirement, with some conventionalized restrictions on its distribution. We offer an explanation for its incorrect previous descriptions and discuss similar alternations between monosyllabic and disyllabic allomorphs of negation in other Austronesian languages and consequences for the prosodic status of second-position clitics.
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Inter-generational attrition Smith, Giuditta; Spelorzi, Roberta; Sorace, Antonella ...
Linguistic approaches to bilingualism,
11/2023
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
The phenomenon of language change in contact has been explored most significantly in speakers of a language who
migrate, while fewer studies explore how language is affected across different ...generations. In this study, we aimed to investigate
the role of inter-generational attrition on the production of clitic pronouns and clitic clusters. 86 adult speakers of Italian
took part in the study: homeland residents, long-term UK residents, and heritage speakers born and living in the UK from Italian
families. Participants were tested on the production of different instances of clitic pronouns including clusters, a novelty of
the study, and differences in response distribution were analysed with General Additive Models. Results reveal that the homeland
population shows a strong preference for the production of clitics and clitic clusters, long-term residents retain a preference
for clitics but not clusters, and heritage speakers disfavour the use of both clitics and clusters across the board, preferring
the use of lexical items. This neat pattern of use across generations of migrants suggests a loss of the specificity and
preference of clitics through language transmission between different generations of speakers of Italian removed from the homeland
and immersed in a non-clitic language.
This paper examines the 3rd person clitic combinations found in a digital corpus of Catalan texts dating from the 11th century to the first half of the 18th (the CICA) and attempts to clarify the ...origin of the current clitic system of colloquial non-Valencian Catalan. Scrutiny of the database shows that the locative HI (i.e., hi or its variants í/y/hic) replaced the canonical dative clitic of 3rd person clusters in the 14th century in both singular and plural forms, contrary to what has previously been claimed. The medieval patterns of usage that the data reveal are very close to those occurring in colloquial non-Valencian Catalan as it is spoken nowadays, as opposed to those seen in Valencian Catalan, where a locative clitic is no longer present. On the basis of this data, we argue that the incompatibility of plural morpheme combinations in Old—among other reasons—forced the generalization of the morpheme /i/ as a dative marker, thus converting it into the true ‘elsewhere’ item of the Catalan clitic system. The similarity between medieval and modern colloquial non-Valencian Catalan clitic forms allows us to analyze them in the same way. Specifically, we suggest there is only one clitic area for these clusters in which the HI works as a place nominal located structurally in the nominal layer.
The series Studies in Language Change presents empirically based research that extends knowledge about historical relations among the world's languages without restriction to any particular language ...family or region. While not devoted explicitly to theoretical explanations, the series hopes to contribute to the advancement in understandings of language change as well as adding to the store of well-analysed historical-comparative data on the world's languages.
The current article argues that the multiple nominative constructions of the Japanese type do not exist in Standard Arabic. Based on evidence from binding, A′-interception and Case, the article shows ...that the so-called ‘broad subject’ is a clitic left-dislocated element base generated in the A′-domain. The article thus follows the spirit of the analysis proposed by Landau (e.g., Landau, Idan. 2009. Against broad subjects in Hebrew.
119(1). 89–101), who denies the existence of broad subjects in Hebrew, concluding that broad subjects do not exist in Semitic languages at all.
