Aspects of the Theory of Clitics (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics)

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

OXFORD STUDIES IN THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS g e n e r a l e d i to r s: Southern California

David Adger, Queen Mary College London; Hagit Borer, University of

a dv i s o ry e d i to r s: Stephen Anderson, Yale University; Gennaro Chierchia, University of Milan; Rose-Marie Dechaine, University of British Columbia; Elan Dresher, University of Toronto; James Higginbotham, University of Southern California; Pat Keating, University of California, Los Angeles; Ruth Kempson, King’s College, University of London; James McCloskey, University of California, Santa Cruz; Gillian Ramchand, University of Tromsø; Maria-Luisa Zubizarreta, University of Southern California published 1 The Syntax of Silence by Jason Merchant 2 Questions and Answers in Embedded Contexts by Utpal Lahiri 3 Phonetics, Phonology, and Cognition edited by Jacques Durand and Bernard Laks 4 At the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface by Lutz Marten 5 The Unaccusativity Puzzle edited by Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Martin Everaert 6 Beyond Morphology by Peter Ackema and Ad Neeleman 7 The Logic of Conventional Implicatures by Christopher Potts 8 Paradigms of Phonological Theory edited by Laura Downing, T. Alan Hall, and Renate Raffelsiefen 9 The Verbal Complex in Romance by Paola Monachesi 10 The Syntax of Aspect edited by Nomi Erteschik-Shir and Tova Rapopart 11 Aspects of the Theory of Clitics by Stephen Anderson i n p r e pa r at i o n Phi Syntax: A Theory of Agreement by Susana Bejar Aspect and Reference Time by Olga Borik Prosodic Morphology by Laura Downing Stratal Optimality Theory by Ricardo Bermúdez Otero Tense, Mood, and Aspect edited by Alessandra Giorgi, James Higginbotham, and Fabio Pianesi The Ecology of English Noun-Noun Compounding by Ray Jackendoff A Natural History of Infixation by Alan Chi Lun Yu The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces edited by Gillian Ramchand and Charles Reiss [ published in association with the series]

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics STEPHEN R. ANDERSON

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Stephen Anderson 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn ISBN 0–19–927990–x 978–0–19–927990–6 ISBN 0–19–927991–8 978–0–19–927991–3 (Pbk.) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents General Preface Acknowledgements

vii viii

1 Introduction

1

2 What is a Clitic?

9

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

Words, Clitics, and Affixes Case I: An Introduction to Kw akw ’ala Clitics Dimensions of Clitic-hood Case II: How “Simple” are English Auxiliary Clitics? Special Clitics Clitics and Affixes

3 The Phonology of Cliticization 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

Prosodic Structure Dimensions of Phonological Cliticization Prosodic Structure and Syntactic Structure Phonological Clitics and Cliticization in English

4 Special Clitics and their Grammar 4.1 Phenomenology 4.2 Special Clitics as the Morphology of Phrases 4.3 Some Examples 5 Theories of Special Clitics 5.1 The Nature of the Problem 5.2 Syntactic Theories of Clitic Placement 6 An Optimal Theory of Clitic Positioning 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Special Clitics as Phrasal Morphology Second Position: Anchors and Domains “Endoclitics” Tagalog Second-Position Clitics

9 14 22 24 31 33 37 37 44 55 64 75 76 82 89 107 108 116 127 127 142 152 165

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Contents

7 Verb Second as Alignment 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6

Verb Movement and Second Position Icelandic Kashmiri Breton Surmiran Rumantsch Conclusions

8 Pronominal Clitics 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

Pronouns and Agreement Clitics, Agreement, and Doubling Clitic Climbing Subject Clitics

9 Clause Structure and the Grammar of Incorporation 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5

Introduction: Two Approaches to Noun Incorporation Fleshing Out the Syntactic and Lexical Accounts Noun Incorporation: Syntax or Lexicon? Denominal Verb Formation in West Greenlandic Conclusion

177 178 183 187 193 204 224 227 228 239 245 249 257 258 264 275 281 286

References

289

Index of Subjects Index of Names Index of Languages

303 311 315

General Preface The theoretical focus of this series is on the interfaces between subcomponents of the human grammatical system and the closely related area of the interfaces ´ between the different subdisciplines of linguistics. The notion of SinterfaceŠ has become central in grammatical theory (for instance, in ChomskyŠs recent Minimalist Program) and in linguistic practice: work on the interfaces between syntax and semantics, syntax and morphology, phonology and phonetics etc. has led to a deeper understanding of particular linguistic phenomena and of the architecture of the linguistic component of the mind/brain. The series covers interfaces between core components of grammar, including syntax/morphology, syntax/semantics, syntax/phonology, syntax/ pragmatics, morphology/phonology, phonology/phonetics, phonetics/speech processing, semantics/pragmatics, intonation/discourse structure as well as issues in the way that the systems of grammar involving these interface areas are acquired and deployed in use (including language acquisition, language dysfunction, and language processing). It demonstrates, we hope, that proper understandings of particular linguistic phenomena, languages, language groups, or inter-language variations all require reference to interfaces. The series is open to work by linguists of all theoretical persuasions and schools of thought. A main requirement is that authors should write so as to understood by colleagues in related subfields of linguistics and by scholars in cognate disciplines. Clitics appear to live at the interfaces between morphology, syntax and prosody. In our eleventh volume, Stephen Anderson addresses the theory of cliticization, and argues that the properties of simple clitics are best captured in terms of independently motivated prosodic structures, couched within an OT framework. He then shows that special clitics can be understood as being the phrasal analogues of morphological affixation, and that an OT account of these can be naturally extended to V2 constructions and pronominal clitics, with important implications for clause structure and the plausibility of head movement. David Adger Hagit Borer

Acknowledgements The work reported here has benefited from the generous support over many years of the National Science Foundation, to whom I have been promising this monograph for all too long. First and foremost, therefore, I would like to acknowledge the support of awards SBR 95--14682 and BCS 98--76456 from the NSF to Yale University. I am extremely grateful for the confidence the NSF, and especially Paul Chapin as director of the Linguistics Program, has shown in my work. A language that figures prominently in the present book is Kw akw ’ala, on which my research over several years in the 1970s was also supported by the NSF, under award BNS 78--15395 to UCLA, as well as by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. My study of Kwakw ’ala was made possible by the assistance of Sam Henderson, Daisy Moon, and Jim Henderson of Campbell River, and by Tommy and Emma Hunt of Victoria, as well as others in Campbell River, Quadra Island, Alert Bay, and Port Hardy, British Columbia. That work was also facilitated by access to manuscript materials of Franz Boas in the library of the American Philosophical Society, which I was able to make use of thanks to permission from the late Zellig Harris. Another language that figures in this book, primarily in Chapters 7 and 8, is Surmiran, a form of Rumantsch. My work on this language was first supported by NSF award BCS 98--76456 and by grants from the Yale University Social Science Research Fund, and continues under NSF award BCS 04--18410 to Yale University. I am grateful to Petra Uffer for many hours of patient instruction in Surmiran, as well as to Ursus Baltermia and my other friends and consultants in Salouf and Savognin. It is a cliché of prefaces such as this one, that too many people have provided me with help, advice, suggestions, and corrections over the years in pursuing this research for it to be possible to enumerate them all without causing the reader’s eyes to glaze over—poor thanks, indeed. I would, however, like to thank the students who have participated in my seminars on clitics at Yale over a number of years, including especially Lizanne Kaiser and others whose work appears in Kaiser (1997). I would also like to acknowledge the help of Julie Legate, who helped to keep me a bit more honest over the course of a presentation of much of this material in the Fall of 2003 at Yale, and who has provided numerous comments and suggestions on the manuscript. Additional comments and assistance on portions of the manuscript from Geert Booij,

Acknowledgements

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Luigi Burzio, Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Sandra Chung, Jerry Sadock, and Ida Toivonen have been extremely valuable. Obviously, none of these people should be blamed for my mistakes or assumed to agree with my opinions. Thanks also to Michiya Kawai for his work on the indexes. Much of the actual writing of this book has been done with the generous support of a sabbatical leave from Yale. During that time, I have been a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Linguistics, School of Classics and Linguistics, at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. I am extremely grateful to the University and the Department for their hospitality and for the generosity with which they have made their facilities available to me, providing me with a delightful atmosphere in which to carry out this work. Particularly pleasant have been frequent conversations with Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy both about matters treated here and about more general issues in morphology and phonology. I must also single out Paul Smolensky. Paul introduced me to the merits of an Optimality Theoretic approach to clitic phenomena in the course of a conversation years ago when I was seeking exactly the opposite: namely, a good argument for ignoring OT in favor of the rule-based analysis I had offered in earlier papers. As the reader will see, I think he was deeply right.

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1 Introduction The literature of (generative) linguistics since the early 1960s is replete with monographs, specialized collections, articles, notes, and other research dealing with the properties of clitics—indeed, entire books (such as Nevis, Joseph, Wanner, and Zwicky 1994) are devoted to nothing but lists of references relevant to the study of clitics. And yet a search of several standard online dictionaries, including Webster’s Unabridged, turns up no mention of the word. The Oxford English Dictionary first notes it in 1946, and defines it thusly: “An enclitic or proclitic.” Not a lot of immediate help there, but at least we have a link to a much older tradition, for the notions of enclitic and proclitic are thoroughly grounded in grammatical description dating back at least to the seventeenth century. The OED’s entry is supported by a quotation from Nida (1949: vii): “Many languages have elements that (1) combine phonologically with words with which they do not form morphological constructions, and (2) do not constitute derivational or inflectional formatives . . . The term ‘clitics’ may . . . be employed in this general meaning.” Etymologically, clitic is from Greek klinein ‘to lean,’ and refers to this tendency of clitics to depend on otherwise unrelated material. Our understanding thus far is essentially negative: a clitic is something that is not integrated into the sentence in the way “normal” words are, and/or not integrated into words in the way affixes are. But despite its negative character, this is the basis not just of one but of two nearly independent research traditions. One of these, the older, is associated in linguistics primarily with traditional grammarians and Indo-Europeanists. This is essentially a phonological understanding, on which a (pro- or en-)clitic is a stressless “little” word that lacks independent accent, and that (as a result) depends prosodically on an adjacent word. The OED defines enclitic, for instance (following Liddell and Scott’s 1843 Greek-English Lexicon) as a word that “ ‘leans its accent on the preceding word’: in Greek grammar the distinctive epithet of those words which

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Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

have no accent, and which (when phonetic laws permit) cause a secondary accent to be laid on the last syllable of the word which they follow. Hence applied to the analogous Latin particles -que, -ve, -ne, etc., and in mod[ern] use (with extension of sense) to those unemphatic words in other lang[uage]s that are treated in pronunciation as if forming part of the preceding word.” This was certainly what Jakob Wackernagel, the patron saint of clitics, meant in his classic paper (Wackernagel 1892) when he spoke of enclitics and proclitics. Such an interpretation is not at all controverted by the point of that paper, which was the further claim that clitics (defined in this way) in the ancient Indo-European languages—and presumably also in Proto IndoEuropean—may huddle together in some particular location (in that case, in “second position,” after the first word of the clause). For example, in the Homeric Greek example in (1.1), the two enclitic elements te ‘and’ and min ‘3sg. acc. pronoun’ both appear immediately after the first full word of the sentence.1 (1.1)

polees=te=min e¯ r¯esanto hipp¯ees phoreein many-and-it prayed riders carry And many riders prayed to carry it (Iliad 4.143)

For Wackernagel, the occurrence of these words in this position followed directly from a property of their form: to wit, their lack of an (independent) accent. The fundamental sense of ‘clitic’ on this view, then, is a phonological one. Clitics are little words that lack accent of their own. Modern syntacticians, on the other hand, have their own distinct ideas about the notion of “clitics.” For them, the study of clitics is essentially the study of a particular class of pronominal elements (and others that behave like them), most commonly the Romance (conjunct) pronouns. This conception is particularly associated with a rich tradition of syntactic research originating in the work of Richard Kayne. In Kayne (1975) a number of distinctive properties are identified with the relevant subset of pronominals, including not only their distinctive position immediately preceding the verb (as opposed to other nominal expressions), but also their inability to be modified or conjoined. These properties go together with certain phonological and semantic idiosyncrasies, and appear to define a category of grammatical elements. For Kayne and those who have continued this line of research, the description of clitics is primarily a matter of the special syntax of these pronouns. 1 In examples, I will generally indicate clitics and their direction of attachment in boldface with “=” separating them from their host. This notation is not intended by itself to indicate anything about the specific phonological or syntactic consequences of such a relation, but only to highlight the items as clitics.

Introduction

3

That notion is extremely widespread. For example, when we consult the index of a recent reference grammar of Catalan (Wheeler, Yates, and Dols 1999) for “clitics,” we find “see pronominal clitics.” This is not because Catalan has no other clitic elements of interest (in Chapter 3, we will see a class of unaccented prepositions in this language that have properties quite worth examining), but rather because syntacticians are particularly interested in elements such as those underlined in example (1.2). (1.2)

hi has anat tota sola? Te me n’ 2sg 1sg part there you have gone all alone Did you go off there all alone (on me)?

For researchers of this persuasion, what is remarkable about the underlined elements in (1.2) is not their lack of accent (a phonological property), but rather the fact that (in Catalan, as in most Romance languages) they all pile up immediately before the finite verb of the clause—a position in which corresponding non-clitic elements would not appear. This sense of “clitic” is thus a (morpho)syntactic one. My goal in this book is to explore both of these senses of clitic, their interrelations, and the implications of their analysis for the theory of grammar more generally. The general perspective will be one that grows out of the theory of A-Morphous Morphology (Anderson 1992), where clitics are regarded as the phrasal analog of (word-level) morphology. In more general terms, theoretically satisfying accounts and explanations will be sought within a view of grammar based primarily on systems of constraints (a version of Optimality Theory) rather than on rules. Much of the analysis on the morphosyntactic side is prefigured by that of Anderson (2000c), which is both extended here and complemented by more attention to the phonological side of the problem. The basic architecture of the book is determined by the distinction between the two logically independent senses of the notion of “clitic” introduced above. I begin in Chapter 2 by endeavoring to separate these by distinguishing simple clitics—referring to a purely phonological dimension of clitic-hood— from special clitics in more or less the sense of Zwicky (1977). I consider two systems that might be taken to illustrate simple clitics, whose behavior we can later compare and contrast with that of morphosyntactically unusual special clitics. The first of these is a set of clitic elements from the Wakashan language Kw akw ’ala, whose properties (while initially remarkable in some respects) are relatively straightforward. The second case considered here yields a rather more complex story, however. It has become fairly common to cite English contracted auxiliary forms such as the ’s in Nixon’s the one as near canonical instances of simple clitics.

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Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

Syntacticians, on the other hand, have developed a rich literature on these elements: if they are really so simple, it is remarkable that so many people have received Ph.D.s for dissertations devoted (entirely or in large part) to a discussion of intricate syntactic conditions on their occurrence. I explore these matters with the goal of seeing what a phonologically based analysis must account for if these elements are indeed to be called “simple” clitics. To say that one sense of the term “clitic” is to be identified with the phonology of the relevant elements does not, of course, actually provide in itself a theory of that dimension. In fact, the phonology of cliticization is closely bound up with the nature and status of the much broader theory of prosodic structure in language, and we can only understand phonological clitics by placing their behavior within this larger context. In Chapter 3, accordingly, I outline a view of prosodic categories and their relations within the framework of Optimality Theory, and use that to arrive at a characterization of the phonology of clitics, especially (but not exclusively) in English. I argue that the properties of English reduced auxiliaries do indeed fall within a phonological account, and thus that there is no obstacle to calling them “simple” clitics in the technical sense, despite the complexities of their behavior. Having given an account of the phonological dimension of cliticization, I then move on in Chapter 4 to the morphosyntax of special clitics. Starting from the classic descriptive generalizations of Zwicky, Klavans, Kaisse, and others (summed up in Anderson 1992) about the locations in which these are found, I will ask what kind of theory might be responsible for getting them there. I conclude on the basis of a number of considerations that morphology and not syntax furnishes the appropriate context for understanding them. Special clitics, that is, constitute the morphology of phrases—a suggestion that has often been made and which I try here to substantiate. Some morphology consists not of affixes but of other sorts of change in shape (“Non-concatenative” morphology). There is a case to be made that the kind of function filled by clitics is sometimes realized by changes in shape other than the addition of segmentable material to a phrase, and instances of such “Non-concatenative” clitics are proposed and analyzed. And just as word-level morphology can be divided between inflection and derivation, there seem to be two corresponding classes of clitics: some that represent grammatical material, such as pronominal arguments; and some that represent more semantic content, such as discourse markers, various adverbials, etc. I discuss the extent to which this distinction among clitics is substantively parallel to that found in morphology. Among the various types of special clitics, by far the most interesting (in the sense of probative) are those that occur in second position within the

Introduction

5

domain to which they are relevant. In Chapter 5 I show why these clitics are so important for the development of an adequate theory of special clitic positioning. Proceeding from a fuller account of the Kw akw ’ala clitics considered earlier, I explore second-position clitics in a variety of languages. I consider a range of possible theories that have been proposed for the positioning of special clitics, and conclude that neither the syntax nor the phonology suffices to describe the grammar of special clitics—a result that is of course entirely in accord with my earlier proposal that the nature of these elements is essentially morphological. I next proceed in Chapter 6 to elaborate a more precise account of the phrasal morphology that is responsible for the appearance of special clitics, within an Optimality Theoretic framework. A limited set of constraint types suffice to describe these (and other possible special clitics) concisely and insightfully, as has also been argued in a series of papers by Géraldine Legendre in recent years as well as in Anderson 2000c. The OT-based account of “Clitics as Phrasal Affixes” is compared with a variety of other theories: those postulating a purely syntactic account of cliticization, and those locating the unusual properties of special clitics in their phonology or in other properties of the interface between syntax and other parts of grammar. The system of second-position clitics in Tagalog provides a complex and nuanced example of a number of the properties discussed to this point. In Chapter 7, I turn from the analysis of clitics per se to an area of syntax that has not generally been taken within the generative tradition to be closely related. Here I pose the question of whether or not it was correct for Jakob Wackernagel, whose classic discussion of second-position clitics in the earliest Indo-European languages has been so often cited (if less often read), to suggest a connection between these clitics and another set of second-position phenomena, the verb-second regularities of Modern German and a number of other languages. I conclude that while Wackernagel’s own notion of the explanatory connection was undoubtedly incorrect, there is indeed a deep link, and the morphosyntactic apparatus used to describe second-position clitics can provide us with an account of verb second in German, Icelandic, Breton, and other languages as well. In the process, we learn some things about the way Optimality Theoretic mechanisms play out in the domain of syntax, where they have been less studied (at least until recently) than in phonology and morphology. Continuing this foray into the syntactic domain, I survey in Chapter 8 some of the substantive syntactic properties of the most widely studied class of clitics, those traditionally analyzed as pronominals. I begin by examining the nature of (predicate-argument) agreement, and comparing it with wellknown phenomena arising in the analysis of special clitics. This requires an

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Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

elaboration of the analysis of the Morphosyntactic Representations of categories, in order to account for phenomena such as (the presence versus absence versus optionality of) clitic doubling, clitic climbing, and the like. While the bulk of the literature devoted to pronominal clitics focuses on object clitics, some languages (including several spoken in northern Italy and in nearby areas of Switzerland) also have special clitics referring to subjects. I explore their properties, including those of Surmiran and a range of “northern Italian dialects.” I discuss the significance of the morphological approach to special clitics for the syntax of functional categories and the proposal that all such categories constitute syntactically autonomous heads (each with its own projection) in syntactic representation. The account of clause structure that results from viewing clitics in the way advocated here has a variety of other wider consequences. One of these involves the plausibility of an approach to incorporation phenomena based on syntactic movement, as developed for instance by Sadock, Baker, and others. If syntactic movement is not involved in incorporation constructions, as I argue, then the foundation for the whole apparatus of Head Movement collapses, and with it much of the plausibility of the elaborately articulated functional structure assumed by syntacticians since the late 1980s. This is a result which is quite in harmony with the picture of clause structure developed in the present work, which assumes that much functional content is present in the form of features on a limited number of structural categories, rather than as a set of functional heads in their own right. In Chapter 9, I explore these matters, and attempt to draw some general morals. From various remarks above it will perhaps be clear that the view of syntactic structure represented in this book does not line up completely with any of the established positions that have dominated discussion over the past decade or so. Apart from occasional turns of phrase, I do not adopt the specific assumptions that have emerged within the Minimalist Program for syntax, though I think that most of what I say could be transposed into that framework with little substantive alteration. I assume an overall picture involving basegenerated structures and operations of displacement relating these to surface form, subject to conditions including those of Binding Theory and the like in a way reminiscent of much work in the framework of Government and Binding or Principles and Parameters. I do not, however, follow the common development of that framework to include an increasing proliferation of structure based on functional categories. Much of this functional content is associated here with an elaboration of the feature structure of categories drawn from a somewhat more limited set, with considerably less “arborization” as a result. The representations I operate with

Introduction

7

are much more similar to surface forms, at least in their degree of internal articulation, than those to which students of generative grammar are typically introduced today, and involve much less movement within functional structure. In part, these differences reflect the fact that for my purposes, much of this functional structure is simply not relevant to the points at issue, and thus can usefully be abbreviated. It should also be clear, however, that there are real differences of principle involved. I assume (and attempt to argue for) the relevance of a constraint-based system of an Optimality Theoretic sort in the development of morphosyntactic structure. This is most prominent in relation to the principles that introduce special clitic elements into sentences, but also plays a role elsewhere (e.g., in producing “verb-second” patterns). This view is of a piece with the Optimality Theoretic interpretation of principles of prosodic structure which forms the basis of the account of phonological clitics offered in Chapter 3. This is probably the longest work published to date based on assumptions from Optimality Theory but which does not include a single constraint tableau. My principal excuse for that is the fact that had I included tableaux to illustrate the arguments made at each point where they would be relevant, the book would be much, much longer. But while I understand the value of these displays for confirming the correctness of complex constraint rankings, I am not convinced of their more general perspicuity. Most of the constraint interactions proposed here are quite straightforward, and I hope they can be appreciated on the basis of the discussion. In any event, I leave the construction of formal tableaux as an exercise for the reader. I cannot hope to argue for all of the details of my (morpho)syntactic assumptions in this book, but I hope that I have made a case for some of the more noticeable deviations from current practice, and that in other instances I have at least made clear what my assumptions are so that others can see whether the differences matter to the real arguments.

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2 What is a Clitic? The modern study of clitics within generative grammar can reasonably be seen as beginning with the survey provided by Zwicky (1977). A number of earlier papers had dealt with the special properties of these elements, especially in terms of their syntax; and after the fashion of the time, Zwicky’s paper was never formally published, but only distributed in mimeographed form. The distinctions proposed there, however, and the observations on which they were based, established a research agenda that has dominated discussion of clitics every since.

2.1 Words, Clitics, and Affixes Zwicky’s classic paper starts from the question of how we distinguish words from affixes, enumerating a number of properties in terms of which these differ. Like many such lists, this one contains some properties that might be regarded as definitional, mixed in with others that are simply common symptoms of an element’s status. Ordering: Affix order within the word is quite rigid, while word order within phrases can vary. The degree of variation differs from language to language, of course, but virtually all languages allow some alternative word orders corresponding to the same essential meaning. In contrast, any variation we find in the order of word-internal affixes is virtually always correlated with a difference in sense. Internal sandhi: Different phonological adjustments may apply within versus across words. The distinction of (word-)internal sandhi from external sandhi goes back (as the etymology of the word sandhi suggests) to the ancient Sanskrit grammarians. It corresponds in large part to the difference between Lexical and Post-lexical phonology in more modern terms (cf. Kaisse and Shaw 1985). Binding: This is Zwicky’s term for the fact that some morphological elements can appear alone, while others only occur in combination. The latter (“Bound Morphemes”) are affixes, while words are free.

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Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

Construction with affixes: If an element is in construction with an affix, it must be either the base or another affix. Zwicky uses this criterion to support the claim that an element in Madurese which occurs between two identifiable affixes in a form whose base can be independently established must itself be an affix. Rule immunity: Syntactic rules, such as deletion under identity, do not affect affixes, since these are proper parts of words. Seen as a criterion for distinguishing words from affixes, this is clearly based on strong Lexicalist assumptions about the relation between morphology and syntax (cf. Anderson (1992) and literature cited there). Accent: Elements that do not bear an independent accent are affixes. If every morphologically discrete element in every language fit nicely into one or the other of (exactly) two patterns with respect to these criteria, we might be content, but of course that is not true, and Zwicky identifies three common types of “mixed” case. These, of course, are three varieties of things we might call clitics. On this account, then, a clitic is a linguistic element which the tests just given do not classify unambiguously as being either a word or an affix. The three patterns identified in this way are then named special clitics, simple clitics, and bound words. Special clitics are characterized as unaccented bound forms that are variants of free forms (similar, that is, in sound and meaning to some non-clitic word); and which display “special” syntax. This might mean simply “different” syntax from the corresponding free form, as French Je la vois ‘I see her’ versus Je vois la femme de mes rêves ‘I see the woman of my dreams.’ In this case (the syntactician’s prototypical instance of a clitic), the pronoun precedes the finite verb, while a corresponding non-pronoun is completely excluded from that position, and instead appears post-verbally (where the pronoun, in its turn, is excluded). More dramatically, the syntax of special clitics may involve their appearing in a position which is not in general accessible per se to rules of the syntax at all—e.g., second position, interpreted as immediately following the first full phonological word of a phrase or clause. Simple clitics are unaccented variants of free morphemes, which may be phonologically reduced and subordinated to a neighboring word. In terms of their syntax, though, they appear in the same position as one that can be occupied by the corresponding free word. Finally, bound words are forms that are always unaccented and phonologically subordinated to a neighboring word. They are often syntactically associated with a whole phrase, while being phonologically associated with a single word in (or adjacent to) it.

What is a Clitic?

11

Examining this classification, we can see that it has some slightly peculiar properties. For example, the difference between special and simple clitics, on the one hand, and bound words, on the other, is based on whether or not a related non-clitic (free) form exists. But what reason do we have to believe that this is really significant? That is, assuming that a cluster of properties (not just a single one) can be identified to separate bound words from the two (other) types of clitic, it is by no means obvious that these should all co-vary depending on whether or not the form in question alternates with another (synonymous but free) form of the same lexical item. Consider the English pronouns which can appear either reduced (If he comes near me, I’ll hit’m [hiRm]) or unreduced (she wanted to meet him " as a clitic by Zwicky’s criteria, in virtue [mijthim]). The former is identified of the latter’s existence. The assumption made at the outset of Zwicky’s paper, motivating some of his decisions about terminology and categories, is that clitic and non-clitic in cases like that of English object pronouns are related by phonological rule. When we look more closely, though, this turns out to be fairly implausible, at least in the general case. Zwicky and Pullum’s (1983) paper on reduced forms of negation in English, for instance (which I will discuss in more detail below), observes that the clitic forms of English auxiliaries like will and would suggest processes that are otherwise quite unprecedented in English phonology. If these clitics are linked to corresponding non-clitics, then this is almost certainly a fact about the relevant (phonologically complex) lexical entries, not a matter of phonologically predictable variants of simple forms. But why should the structural character of a linguistic form as a “clitic” depend crucially on the contingent matter of whether it happens to be linked with another, non-clitic form in a single (syntactically and semantically, but not phonologically) uniform lexical entry? Macaulay (1987) describes a set of clitic forms in the Otomanguean language Mixtec, and makes this point in greater detail. She shows that in that language there are phonological rules deleting glottal stops, coalescing sequences of identical vowels, and deleting word-initial syllables, in rapid speech. These processes have the effect of reducing disyllabic forms to monosyllables under appropriate conditions, and some forms show an alternation that is driven by these rules. We can see that the variation between disyllabic and monosyllabic forms is a consequence of these rules, because in slower speech the lost syllables are “restored.” But there are other forms for which the ‘short’ form does not correspond to any longer slow-speech form, and in some other cases, the alternation is not something that can be derived from the (independently motivated) phonology.

12

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

For instance, the third person masculine object pronoun is /ˇcàà/ in its full form, but /–re/ when reduced. The full form of the first person familiar pronoun is /ruPu/, for both subjects and objects; the corresponding reduced form /-ri/ can only be used for subjects, however. The reduced form of /ruPu/ as an object is the (phonologically predictable) shape /-ru/. These diverse relations show that the reduced forms are not—or at least not in the general case— derived by the operation of phonological rules. It looks, then, as if the clitic and non-clitic forms in such cases are often lexical alternates. For instance, English would has two lexical shapes: the clitic form /–d/ and the non-clitic /wUd/. The Mixtec third-person masculine object has the forms /ˇcàà/ and /–re/, etc. In each of these cases, the forms in the lexical entry must be accompanied by some statement of their distribution. But in that case, the difference between clitic forms and bound words loses much of its theoretical interest: a bound word is just an unaccented lexical item that does not happen to have any non-clitic lexical alternant—surely not a fundamental difference of status. What about cases where there really is some motivated phonological reduction that relates the clitic to the non-clitic form? This is the case with much (though not all) of the Mixtec lexicon, for example, and perhaps it is also true for English object pronouns. In that case, we want to say the lexical entry provides only one lexical shape, and the phonology has an effect that yields a reduced form (a clitic). Here it appears that we have something which is different both from pure non-clitics and from lexically distributed clitics. But what is it that we have in such cases? Everything depends on what we want to say the nature of a “clitic” is, and in particular, whether the existence of certain rules in the phonology could be relevant to an item’s classification. If “clitic” is a (lexical or grammatical) category like noun, verb, etc., it is surely quite anomalous to suggest that a phonological rule could convert something into one. But in fact, there is no reason to believe that “(phonological) clitic” is a primitive, on the order of the lexical categories. Clitic behavior involves (a) the absence of autonomous accent, a property shared by most (though as we will see, not all) affixes; and (b) phonological subordination to another word. In fact, as soon as there came to be a real theory of prosodic structure within which to articulate the problem (well after the appearance of Zwicky’s paper), it became possible to give a coherent definition of the phonological property that makes something a clitic without treating “clitic” as a lexical or grammatical category. The necessary framework, which we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, is grounded in discussions of the so-called “prosodic hierarchy,” for which a classic reference point is the presentation in Selkirk (1984) or Nespor and Vogel (1986).

What is a Clitic?

13

A first approximation to a characterization of clitics, along lines we will amplify later, is as follows. Let us say that the phonological substance of a word is organized into a relatively high-level prosodic domain, the “prosodic word.” A constituent of this type is composed of feet, which in turn are composed of syllables, composed of segments, linked to features. Affixes, in contrast to lexical words, consist of segments, or syllables, or even feet; but these are not (generally) organized into a prosodic word. Prosodic words, in turn, are the constituents of phonological phrases, etc. When phonological material does not have enough prosodic structure to be integrated into the prosodic structure of the whole utterance on its own (by virtue of not being organized into a prosodic word), it must be dependent on some adjacent material that can provide the necessary bridge between lower- and higher-level prosodic categories. This sort of incorporation into an adjacent word is just the behavior we associate with clitics (in the phonological sense), which we can thus propose to treat as prosodically deficient forms. Assume that prosodic deficiency is not tolerated at the phonetic interface: in order to be pronounced, every bit of phonetic content must be integrated into the prosodic hierarchy of syllable, foot, word, phrase, etc. As a result, where a potential utterance contains some ‘deficient’ material, some principle of adjunction has to operate within the phonology to incorporate it into the structure if it is to be pronounced (and the overall structure is to be wellformed). This usually happens by adjunction into an adjacent constituent of the relevant type: i.e., segments may be adjoined into a neighboring syllable, syllables into a foot, feet into a prosodic word, etc.—though in some instances, as we will see in Chapter 3, the adjunction may not be at the lowest possible level of structure. I will refer to whatever principle(s) a language may have for prosodic incorporation of such stray material as its rule(s) of Stray Adjunction.1 Let us call the adjacent element that serves as the target of this adjunction the clitic’s host. This operation, which I will treat in more detail in Chapter (3), is the phonological form of cliticization.2 By virtue of not projecting structure at the level of the phonological word—a first approximation to the deficiency diagnostic of simple clitics— such elements also will not have autonomous stress, assuming (as is common) that stress is defined over a word tree, or at least within that domain. Phonological rules that apply internal to words will treat them as part of the same 1 This terminology should not be construed to prejudge such matters as whether rules or constraints are the appropriate way to think about Stray Adjunction, or indeed whether Stray Adjunction is always “adjunction” in formal terms. We simply need a convenient term for the way in which languages deal with prosodically deficient material. 2 The proposal that integration of otherwise deficient material into prosodic structure is what is involved in phonological cliticization has also been made and defended by other authors, including Lahiri, Jongman, and Sereno (1990) and Booij (1996).

14

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

domain as adjacent material to which they are adjoined, though whether “Lexical” or “Post-lexical” phonology will apply at the boundary between clitics and their hosts, whether the presence of a clitic can affect the location of stress within the host, and other phonological matters will depend on the intricacies of the precise structure which results from the adjunction, and also on the details of the phonologies of particular languages. But this much gives us an overall framework within which we can hope to explore the phonological dimension of cliticization, leaving the morphosyntactic peculiarities that are important to Zwicky’s notion of special clitics to be dealt with in later chapters. Let us now look at some concrete examples of “simple clitics” in more depth.

2.2 Case I: An Introduction to Kw akw ’ala Clitics As an example of a set of clitics whose distinctive properties arise as a consequence of their phonology, I look first at the determiner and pronominal clitics of Kw akw ’ala. Although the syntax of these elements is not unusual, their phonology has consequences that are quite striking at first glance, and indeed there are aspects of the language’s syntax that also derive from their phonology. In later chapters we will see that this language also displays “special” clitics, but my focus here is on elements whose behavior derives from the fact that they are prosodically deficient in the sense of the preceding section. The name Kw akw ’ala is commonly used to designate a number of distinct but related dialects spoken by a number of distinguishable tribal groups on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and in areas of the adjacent mainland (of which the Kwaguì are one, but only one). The area in which Kw akw ’ala is spoken is identified as “Kwakwaka’wakw” on the map in Figure 2.1, following current local usage. It is a member of the Northern Wakashan family of languages, related to the other Northern Wakashan languages Oowikyala (“Owikeno”), Heiltsuk (Bella Bella), and Haisla; and more distantly, to the languages of the Southern Wakashan family (“Nootka,” “Nitinaht,” and Makah). The time depth of the entire Wakashan family is probably something like 3000 years, and that of its northern branch perhaps 2000 (Bach and Howe 2002). Kw akw ’ala is better known as “Kwakiutl”3 from the name Franz Boas used for the language in his extensive work on it. This includes two full grammars 3 This derives from a nineteenth-century missionary orthography (Hall 1889), and is actually intended to represent the name of the people (the [kw ag,uì]), as opposed to the name of their language, ([kw akw ’ala]). Although this writing system fails to represent several major phonological distinctions in the language, it has a great deal of sentimental appeal to many of its speakers, especially among older people. Writing systems that are more nearly adequate to the phonology of Kw akw ’ala inevitably involve a fair number of diacritics and unusual characters, a feature that speakers dislike since it seems to make their language look strange and exotic.

What is a Clitic?

15

Figure 2.1. Some First Nations languages of British Columbia. “Kwakwaka’wakw” = Kw akw ’ala; other Northern Wakashan languages are Haisla, Heiltsuk, and Oweekeno. Southern Wakashan languages include Nuu-chah-nulth (“Nootka”) and Ditidaht (“Nitinaht”). Reproduced courtesy of the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia. Copyright 1994.

(Boas 1911, 1947) and many volumes of texts, prepared over a period of many years. The description here is based on my own fieldwork during several summers in the 1970s, but I have drawn most of my examples and cited forms from Boas’s work, to facilitate comparison. I have, however, modified Boas’s transcriptions to reflect my own understanding of Kw akw ’ala phonological structure. As noted in Anderson (1985b), Boas employed representations that are extremely close to the surface phonetics, in ways that sometimes obscure their structural interpretation. To appreciate the role of the clitics in Kw akw ’ala morphosyntax, it is necessary to introduce some of the basic features of the language’s syntax (cf. Anderson (1984) and references cited there for further details). The basic clause structure is quite rigidly VSO, and conforms to the schema in (2.1). (2.1) V—Sbj(—x.-Obj)(—s-Obj)(—PP*)

16

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

The verb always comes first in the clause, although the sentence-initial element is often a semantically empty auxiliary verb, with the lexical verb following. The verb is then immediately followed by the subject if this is overt. As discussed in Anderson (1984), a sentence may contain more than one verb. In that case, the subject may immediately follow either the sentence-initial verb—typically, a semantically empty auxiliary—or the last verb in the sequence. Regardless of the position of the subject, remaining arguments and adjuncts follow all verbs, in the sequence to be described below. I abstract away from this limited optionality in the position of the subject in the discussion below. The subject is followed in its turn by one or both of two kinds of object argument phrase. These are called “objects” and “instrumentals” by Boas, though their precise semantics do not always correspond to these descriptive terms, and they should be regarded as formal categories. “Objects” are marked with x. and “instrumentals” with s; they come in that order if both are present. An example containing an overt subject and both types of object argument is given in (2.2). (2.2) y@lkw @mas=ida b@gw an@ma=x.-a ’watsi=s-a gw ax.ňux.w cause hurt-dem man-obj-dem dog-inst-dem stick The man hurt the dog with the stick Non-subject arguments can be supplied by weak pronominal elements, such as the word-final =s and =q in the examples in (2.3). (2.3)

a. x.w @sPid=ida b@gw an@ma=x.-a g@nan@ma=s struck-dem man-obj-dem child-instr The man struck the child with it b. x.w @sPid=ida b@gw an@ma=q struck-dem man-obj The man struck him c. x.w @sPida=∅=q=s struck-he-obj-inst He struck him with it

Pronominal forms also exist for the subject, but these behave somewhat differently from the non-subject pronominals. Since the third-person form is typically null phonologically, I will ignore the subject forms for the present. In the examples of (2.2) and (2.3), we have several representative instances of simple clitics. Note first that each full nominal expression is preceded by a determiner element: -ida, -x.a, -sa, etc. Although this provides case marking and deictic information about the nominal that follows, it attaches

What is a Clitic?

17

phonologically to the preceding word, regardless of that word’s syntactic affiliation. This prosodic attachment shows us that these elements are clitics, and the way it works shows us that Stray Adjunction in Kw akw ’ala operates rigidly to adjoin prosodically weak material to the left, despite the syntactically counter-intuitive nature of the result. As illustrated in (2.3), any of the overt (third-person) nominal arguments may be substituted by a pronominal form. These are also (simple) clitics, and attach to the preceding word. Consistent with the claim that these are ‘simple clitics,’ they appear in the position of the corresponding full nominal argument expression. And like the determiners, they attach to their left. The core of the clause can be followed by any number of adjunct expressions. These take the form of prepositional phrases, although it is worth noting that the language has only a very small number of prepositions. Most PPs employ the same preposition, la4 with the semantics of the adjunct relation supplied by affixes within the verb. As an alternative to a full case-marked nominal expression in argument position, non-subject arguments can be supplied by Adjunct phrases instead, as illustrated in (2.4). (2.4) a. la-ň-@n kw ’ix.Pid-uň y@s-gada kw ix.ayu-k aux-fut-I strike-you with-dem club-dem I’ll strike you with this club b. noìa-∅-s-is kw ix.ayu lax.-is ts’a’ya threaten-he-inst-his club to-his younger brother He threatened his younger brother with his club c. la-’mis-@s ńiqala-ň@-s aňa’n@m gax-@n aux-conn-you name-fut-inst wolf to-me And so you will name me (with) wolf There are no independent clitic forms for first-person (singular or plural, inclusive or exclusive) objects. An object argument with first-person reference must be supplied by an adjunct (such as gax n ‘me’ in (2.4c)). Further, there are no non-clitic pronouns that occupy argument positions. The only full words with “pronominal” reference are predicates (e.g., nugw aP m ‘it is I’). These are entirely parallel to the language’s ‘wh-words’, which similarly are predicates and not nominals (e.g., ngw a- ‘(to be) who?’, ’mas-‘(to be) what?’). To some extent, Adjuncts alternate with argument nominals, as shown in (2.5). e

e

e

4

It is interesting that this form is homophonous with the verb la ‘go’, and that it is suppletively replaced by the form gax when the object is first person. This, in its turn, is homophonous with the verb gax ‘come’. The origin of the form in a serial verb construction seems evident.

18

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

(2.5)

a. ’nik@-∅-x.-is x.w @nukw say-he-obj-his child He said to his child b. ?’niki-∅ lax.-is x.w @nukw say-he to-his child He said to his child

The same argument cannot be represented simultaneously by an adjunct and an overt element (e.g., a clitic pronoun) in argument position, however; that is, there is no ‘doubling’ of overt pronouns, as shown in (2.6). (2.6)

a. nik@-∅-q say-he-obj He says to him b. *nik@-∅-q lax.-is x.w @nukw say-he-obj to-his child He says to his child

The basic set of clitic pronouns is given in Figure 2.2. Person 1sg 1Incl 1Excl 2nd 3rd

Subject -@n(ň) -@nts [email protected] -@s ∅

Object — — — -uň -q

Instrumental -@n(ň) -@nts [email protected] -us -s

Figure 2.2. Clitic pronouns in Kw akw ’ala

We see that argument positions can be filled by any of the following: a (case-marked) full nominal expression; a (phonologically) weak pronominal in the same position as a full nominal, attaching phonologically to its left; or else by an empty pro, which I assume to occupy argument positions when the referent of the corresponding argument is specified by an Adjunct. In this, I follow the line argued for by Baker (1995) with respect to all argument positions in Mohawk. I will return to this analysis in later chapters to explore its consequences in more detail. Notice that the clitic elements introduced above really do form part of a phonological word with the preceding word. This is confirmed by the phonology: at the boundary between a clitic and its host, we get word-internal phonology rather than the phonology which otherwise occurs across word

What is a Clitic?

19

boundaries. One small example of this, cited by Boas (1947), is the rule of consonantal epenthesis given in (2.7), a rule which does not apply to /ìs/ sequences formed across the boundaries between words. (2.7) a. ∅ →t/ì—s b. dug.w ìts < dug.w ł=s ‘it was seen by him’ Even more diagnostic in this regard is the placement of stress. Stress in Kw akw ’ala appears on the first full vowel (or non-glottal syllabic resonant) of the word, where the relevant notion of “word” includes a host and any following clitics. Clitics thus display their dependent status by not initiating new stress domains. We could express the phonological behavior of clitics in Kw akw ’ala informally by the rule in (2.8). e

e

(2.8) Stray Adjunction (Kw akw ’ala): Adjoin stray material to a PWord on its left. In Chapter 3, I will refine this description somewhat by recasting it within a framework based on constraints and situating it within a broader account of prosodic categories in general. There is actually a good deal more to say about the Kw akw ’ala determiner system, and I will explore it further in Chapter 4. The clitic nature of determiners in Kw akw ’ala is not simply a matter of the way in which they are pronounced. It has significant implications for the range of syntactic possibilities in the language. These follow from the fact that the left edge of a nominal expression in Kw akw ’ala is always marked with a clitic determiner, and this must attach to its left as a consequence of (2.8). From this, it results that a nominal expression cannot be pronounced by itself, since it must always be preceded by a host for its initial clitic. When there is no preceding constituent, the place of such a host must be supplied by an initial prothetic stem, as in (2.9). (2.9) *(yi)=x.ux.da g nan m child (∅)-dem (it’s) that child e

e

A second consequence of the dependent nature of Kw akw ’ala determiners is that no nominal can ever appear in sentence-initial position, as (e.g.) a topic phrase. Again, such an initial phrase would have no preceding host for its determiner clitic, and a prothetic stem would alter the syntax of the construction. It is actually quite unusual for a VSO language like Kw akw ’ala to lack such an initial topic construction.

20

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

We can compare this situation with that in closely related languages whose clitic systems are different from that of Kw akw ’ala. Both Haisla and Heiltsuk (Bella Bella) lack determiner clitics at the left edge of nominal expressions, although they do have other determiner clitic elements. In Oowiky’ala (Oweekeno, Rivers Inlet), determiner elements are all internal to the nominal, and no determiner clitic appears at the left edge as in Kw akw ’ala. The examples in (2.10) are taken from Boas’s (1928) collection of bilingual texts, and provide both Oowiky’ala and Kw akw ’ala versions for comparison. (2.10)

a. (O) gi sukw a’la hanń@ma=se (K) la’lai ax.Pid@la=x.is hanaň’@ma then took(-his) arrow(-his) Then hei took hisi arrow b. (O) wala’li subotsowi’la hanń@ma=se (K) la’lai dax.Pid=x.a hanaň’@ma=s Then took(-obj) arrow-his Then shei took hisj,∗i arrow

In Heiltsuk (Bella Bella; cf. Rath (1981)), the determiner system is fairly intricate and involves a number of component parts (like Kw akw ’ala, as we shall see in Chapter 4). As the examples in (2.11) illustrate, however, none of these parts is a clitic appearing at the left edge of the nominal. (2.11)

a. p’ála wísm=á=x.i la uxw ňiás=a=x.i work man-det1-det2 on roof–det1-det2 The man worked on the roof b. p’ála p’ác’uá=ya=s wísem=x.i la uxw ňiás=a=x.i work diligent-det1-conn man-det2 on roof–det1-det2 The diligent man worked on the roof p’ác’uá=s wísem=x.i la c. p’ála ’wála=ya=s work really-det1-conn diligent-conn man-det2 on uxw ňiás=a=x.i roof–det1-det2 The really diligent man worked on the roof

Corresponding to this difference in the determiner systems among Wakashan languages, we find a syntactic difference: languages without left edge clitic determiners also allow a construction with an initial nominal representing a topic, though otherwise their word order is very similar to what we find in Kw akw ’ala. The examples in (2.12) with initial topics are presented

What is a Clitic?

21

for Bella Bella by Boas (1947: 298), who explicitly links them to the absence of initial determiner clitics. (2.12)

a. (gi) pkw ’ala ’m@nuk (then) one-person say (Then) one man said . . . b. h´@lxPainoxw láoňde g.@n´@m-xde=a=se Killer whale removed wife-former-det1-your A killer whale took away your (removed from presence) wife

Haisla, like the other Northern Wakashan languages except Kw akw ’ala, lacks determiner clitics at the left edges of nominals and allows initial topics as illustrated in (2.13), drawn from a published text (Lincoln, Rath, and Windsor (1986)). (2.13)

a. kw a’nalasgułd h’x.w h’a’maka mia-gila-su=si yellow cedar try first fish-make-pass-3agt Yellow cedar wood was the first thing he tried to turn into salmon b. hnńm-’wsm sa’wati hs=qids Gala=yads bgw anm=x.i du people-det2 and arrow-still use by-3inv first-det1 łk’w =is bow-det The arrow was still used by them, the first people, and the bow

Finally, we find a very similar situation in Ditidaht (“Nitinaht”), a southern Wakashan language (cf. Klokeid (1976)). In this language, as the examples in (2.14) show, a determiner appears after the first word of the nominal and case is indicated by a separate word (Po¯yoqw ‘acc’ in these sentences). (2.14)

a. tl’itchitl=ibt=P Pa John bowatc Po¯ yoqw shoot-past-decl John deer acc John shot a deer b. tl’itchitl=ibt=P Pa John bowatc=P Paq Po¯ yoqw shoot-past-decl John deer-det acc John shot the deer c. tl’itchitl=ibt=P Pa John P¯ıx.=P Paq bowatc Po¯ yoqw shoot-past-decl John big-det deer acc John shot the big deer

Crucially, no left-edge determiner clitic appears in Ditidaht nominals, and accordingly, initial topics are possible as in (2.15).

22

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

(2.15) [ o¯ yoqw=obt=P Pa [ P¯ıx.=P Paq bowatc ] ] tl’itcitl John acc-past-decl big-det deer shoot John The big deer, John shot (it) The correlation between determiner systems and the possibility of sentence-initial topics make it clear that the absence of this latter construction in Kw akw ’ala must be due to the impossibility of providing a host for the determiner clitics that appear at the left edges of nominals in this language. Although the distinctive properties of these elements are phonological in nature, they have syntactic consequences. I will return to the clitics of Kw akw ’ala in Chapter 4, where additional elements with the properties of “special” clitics will be discussed. There is considerably more to be said about the phonological dimension of cliticization before we move on to those syntactic matters, however. At this point I would like to return to the foundational issues of how to identify clitics, and how to disentangle the diverse senses in which something can be thought of meaningfully as deserving that designation.

2.3 Dimensions of Clitic-hood Let us return to the typology of clitic elements, as presented originally in Zwicky (1977). On that picture, the elements Zwicky called simple clitics are merely one (or more) of the alternative phonological forms of certain lexical items (in particular, the prosodically deficient realization(s) of the item in question). “Bound words” are the limiting case of this: lexical items that only have prosodically deficient phonological forms. And where a free form undergoes phonological reduction to become a clitic, what that means is that the rule in question reduces its prosodic organization (perhaps pruning its “word” node, so as to make it an isolated foot or syllable), with the result that it comes under the same phonological regularities as forms that are lexically deficient. On this account, there are three quite distinct categories of element that display the same prosodic behavior: bound words, which are uniformly deficient in prosody; (simple) clitics, sensu stricto, the prosodically deficient alternants of certain free forms; and free forms which have undergone phonological reduction. But it is far from clear that this distinction is a meaningful one. For instance, we saw above that Kw akw ’ala has no full forms with pronominal reference. Only the clitics of Figure 2.2 serve that purpose in the language. Since these words have no lexical non-clitic alternants, and are not phonologically reduced from free forms, they are (in the classification under discussion) bound words. In the related language Heiltsuk (Bella Bella), however, first- and second-person forms have both clitic and independent, fullword alternants, as in Figure 2.3 (drawn from Boas (1947:296) and Rath (1981)).

What is a Clitic? Person 1st 1Incl 1Excl 2nd 3rd

Independent form nugw a nugw @nts nugw @ntkw qsu —

Subject -nugw a, -@n -@nts -@ntkw -(@)s(u) ∅

Object -@nňa -@nň@nts -@nň@ntkw -uň -q

23

Instrumental q@sq@ntsq@ntkw -us -s

Figure 2.3. Pronouns in Heiltsuk (Bella Bella)

In the first- and second-person cases, the clitic pronouns and full forms are optional variants, as shown by the pairs in (2.16). These examples are cited from Rath (1981), with the orthography used there adjusted slightly to facilitate comparison with other examples in the present discussion. (2.16)

a. a´@mbaya his núgw a /qs= a´@mbaya ahead inst me 1sg-inst ahead one ahead of me one ahead of me b. a´@mbaya his qsú /a´@mbay =us ahead inst you ahead 2-inst one ahead of you one ahead of you

In the third person, however, only the clitic form (as in a´ mbaya=s ‘one ahead of him’) is found. The first- and second-person clitic forms in Heiltsuk are truly clitics in Zwicky’s classification, since they have full-form variants, but the third-person form is instead a “bound word.” Clearly this distinction does not correspond to the one we want: rather, we want to classify all of the prosodically dependent forms (i.e., all of the pronominals in Kw akw ’ala, and both the proclitic and enclitic forms in Heiltsuk) as clitics, regardless of whether or not they have non-clitic lexical alternants. The most appropriate sense of clitic, then (at least in the present phonological context) seems to be one that is independent of the existence (or lack thereof) of non-clitic alternate forms of the item in question. e

(2.17) Phonological Clitic: A linguistic element whose phonological form is deficient in that it lacks prosodic structure at the level of the (Prosodic) Word. We could then use Zwicky’s term simple clitic to refer to an element whose only claim to clitic-hood is phonological in the sense of (2.17), though I will usually use phonological clitic instead in this book, to highlight the nature of the elements under discussion. Recall that classical usage (e.g., that of Wackernagel) equated clitic status with lack of independent accent, and that property follows directly for

24

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

elements that satisfy (2.17). Phonologists have assumed at least since the appearance of Liberman and Prince (1977) that stress accent is definitionally a property of the metrical structure of Prosodic Words, and obviously an element that does not have such structure does not, by itself, project stress. But that analysis also allows us to accommodate one of the types of clitic that Zwicky (1977) considers unusual. In (Modern) Greek, enclitics do not receive stress. Thus, [ðóse] ‘give!’; [ðóse=mu] ‘give me!’ with no stress on the clitic =mu. But when two such enclitics are attached to the same host, a stress appears on the penultimate one, as in [ðóse=mú=to] ‘give it to me!’ The claim that =mu ‘me’ is a clitic seems to be compromised by the fact that it has an accent. The answer to this apparent conundrum is that, while it does not constitute a Prosodic Word in its own right, a clitic does (indeed, must) get incorporated into the larger prosodic structure projected by its host. The relevant stress which appears on the clitic is assigned not to the clitic per se, but rather to the larger word of which it is (now) a part—specifically, in Modern Greek, to the penultimate syllable. I will discuss prosodic structure and its assignment in more detail in Chapter 3. Assume for now, however, that an appropriate structure has already been assigned to the word [ðóse] ‘give!’ consisting of a word containing a single, left-dominant foot including both of its syllables. Now when just a single additional syllable is incorporated into the word (by whatever principle of Stray Adjunction applies in Modern Greek), as in [ðósemu] ‘give me!’ no new foot is constructed on this added material, since feet in Greek must be minimally bisyllabic, and [mu]σ remains a syllable—part of the Prosodic Word (and thus pronounceable), but not parsed as part of any foot. When two clitics are added, however, as in [ðóse=mú=to], there is now enough material to build a new foot (composed of the two enclitic syllables), and thus to create a new stress. But this foot (and the syllables that compose it) is not a word that projects stress on its own: rather, it is part of a larger Prosodic Word, whose base is the clitics’ host [ðóse].5 There is thus no contradiction between the clitic status of the pronominal elements =mu and =to, on the one hand, and their manifestation with phonetic stress on the other.

2.4 Case II: How “Simple” are English Auxiliary Clitics? In looking at the phonological dimension of cliticization, we have already seen one set of “simple clitics,” in the Kw akw ’ala pronouns and determiners discussed in section 2.2. These illustrate one relatively simple instance in which 5

See also Steriade (1988) for an account of more complex cases of this sort.

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25

we might be tempted to attribute distinctive syntax to a set of clitics, but where it turns out that the relevant properties follow from their phonological character alone. What makes the Kw akw ’ala elements of section 2.2 clitics is a purely phonological property, but one with syntactic consequences. The need for a prosodic host entails the restriction that they cannot appear in constructions where they would be initial within a phrase, such as in the position of a sentence-initial topic. Their syntax follows without additional stipulation from their phonology. Before proceeding to a more general theoretical framework for the phonology of cliticization, I look first at a somewhat more notorious example, where the “simplicity” of the designation “simple clitic” is rather more seriously in question. This is the case of the reduced forms of a number of auxiliary verbs in English. These have often been suggested to be simple clitics, but an enormous literature attests to the fact that at least superficially, they have distinctive syntactic properties. We need to determine whether, as in the Kw akw ’ala case, these can be derived from the phonology of the items in question. Auxiliary Reduction in English The basic facts are quite straightforward. Several common English auxiliary verbs, including is and has, can appear either in a full form or reduced—in these cases, to a single consonant ’s. (2.18)

a. Fred is the only werewolf I know. b. Fred’s the only werewolf I know. c. Fred has only been a werewolf since last week. d. Fred’s only been a werewolf since last week.

The questions that arise come from the fact that substitution of the reduced form for the full form of the auxiliary is not entirely free. Under some circumstances, only the full form can appear, as illustrated by the sentences in (2.19). (2.19)

a. Do you know what Freddie is/*’s (this year for Halloween)? b. Tommy has been a werewolf more often than Freddie has/*’s (at Halloween).

While not all of the English auxiliary verbs have these reduced forms, quite a number do. The ones in which we will be interested are those in Figure 2.4. They appear in a proper subset of the positions where unreduced forms can appear: that is, an unreduced form can always substitute for a reduced one, but not vice versa. The fact that the reduced auxiliaries appear in positions where the syntax would put corresponding non-clitic forms suggests that they

26

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics Full form is are am has have had will would

Reduced ’s ’re ’m ’s ’ve ’d ’ll ’d

Figure 2.4. English Reduced Auxiliaries

are simple rather than special clitics (in Zwicky’s terminology). On the other hand, the restrictions on where they occur, such as those illustrated in (2.19), have often been associated with the syntax. We need an account both of the possibility of these elements and also of the limitations on their appearance. We also want to keep another consideration in mind. Whatever the correct analysis turns out to be, it has to be one that children can plausibly acquire quite easily. A basic fact about this matter is the observation that transcripts of children’s utterances contain essentially no instances of reduced forms where these are impossible in adult speech. Furthermore, in experiments designed to bias children toward producing inappropriate instances of the reduced forms, they still do not do so.6 This suggests that the correct account must be quite deeply embedded in principles of Universal Grammar that plausibly govern children’s grammars at all stages, rather than based on detailed languageparticular stipulations. Kaisse’s (1985) Analysis A convenient starting point is Kaisse’s (1985) extensive discussion of a range of cliticization phenomena in English, even though Kaisse’s notion of “simple clitics” was evidently somewhat different from the one suggested here. Her description had its origins in an earlier paper entitled “The Syntax of Auxiliary Reduction in English,” and I have proposed that it is characteristic of simple clitics that their syntax has nothing special about it. If these items arise through the intervention of specifically syntactic effects, they would not be simple clitics in my sense. Although she follows Zwicky (1977) in proceeding from a definition of clitic that assumes a relation between reduced and full forms (which I suggested in section 2.3 is not really a significant property), Kaisse does not depend 6 See Anderson and Lightfoot (2002) and references cited there for discussion and support of these claims.

What is a Clitic?

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essentially on this. She argues that another distinction is rather more important: among the items that have both a full and a phonologically reduced form, the difference is sometimes attributable to the phonology alone, and sometimes idiosyncratic. For example, don’t displays the shapes [dõ] and [don] which arise from ordinary fast-speech reduction processes. Reduction of a final cluster /nt/ to the nasal alone, and further reduction of a final nasal to nasalization of a preceding vowel, are processes that apply rather generally in the post-lexical phonology of English, especially in rapid speech. The special form [d˜@] (as in I don’t want to, pronounced as [a­d˜@"wan@]), though, appears to be a lexically idiosyncratic variant of don’t, rather than being produced by productive processes. This is suggested by the fact that the phonologically similar auxiliary won’t has forms [wõ] and [won] (in He won’t be there, and she won’t arrrive until later), but no form [w˜@]. Kaisse argues that all of the reduced auxiliaries and modals in Figure 2.4 are lexically specified, and do not arise through the operation of phonological rules. Since English does not have productive phonological rules that could derive the observed reduced forms of is, are, am, has, have, had, will, would, these variants must all be lexically listed alternative stems. Compare, e.g., would (with the reduced variant ’d) with could, should, whose only variants [k@d] and [š@d] can be derived by fast-speech phonology. This difference points up a significant issue in working out a theory of the phonology of cliticization. Given a lexically determined alternation, such as we find for instance with has versus ’s, we can study the distribution of the reduced form (’s) and ask what the conditions are under which it can be used or inserted. If the very existence of the reduced form follows from the phonology, though, there are no conditions on where it can be inserted. The full form is inserted everywhere, and then the post-lexical phonology does what it likes on the basis of derived structure. Because of this difference, when we evaluate the conditions on cliticization, we have to be clear in each case that we are actually dealing with a clitic form, and not just with a phonetic variant derived by the phonology from a full form. Kaisse’s view of what is going on in the reduced forms was premised on the notion that the syntax is implicated. Her resolution of the problem was as follows: under certain circumstances, one syntactic element may be cliticized to another in the specific sense of being syntactically adjoined to it. When that happens, the clitic variant of the lexical item is chosen, and otherwise, the non-clitic variant is used. The basic operation involved in cliticization is thus a syntactic one, and the conditions on the appearance of phonological clitics are to be sought in the properties of the syntactic representation.

28

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics A representative derivation illustrating this view is given in (2.20).

[is]aux [leaving]VP (output of syntax) (2.20) [Jack]NP [[Jack] is]NP [t] [leaving]VP (cliticization) [[­Jack] is]NP [t] ["leaving]VP (sentence prosody) [t] ["leaving]VP (allomorph selection) [[­Jack]z]NP Jack’s leaving (voice assimilation) This analysis has certain features that are somewhat strange. Centrally, we must ask why we should believe that the syntactic form of a sentence is altered when cliticization occurs. That is, why should we believe that syntactic restructuring is involved in cliticization? One possible argument for that claim would be provided if we found cases where the clitic moves as a unit with its host, and where the corresponding uncliticized sequence did not behave that way. When we construct potential examples, however, that is not what we find. (2.21)

a. I think John’s/is at the door. b. Whoi do you think [ei ]’s/is at the door? c. *Who’s do you think at the door?

The failure of such clitic-plus-host combinations to move as a unit could, of course, be due to the fact that cliticization occurs only after all other relevant syntax is completed. To say that, however, is to say that no possible evidence could support the proposal that cliticization involves syntactic restructuring, which obviously eliminates its status as an empirical claim. A different pattern which Kaisse examines is that of sequences of auxiliary plus negation, as in (2.22). (2.22)

a. Won’t Jones be in the office tomorrow? b. *Will not Jones be in the office tomorrow?

Here a putative host-plus-clitic combination does indeed move as a unit, but the trouble with this example is that, as noted in section 2.6 below, Zwicky and Pullum (1983) have shown convincingly that won’t in such sentences is actually a unitary inflected verbal form, and not a host+clitic sequence. As such there is no question that it is a single word,7 while will not is a sequence of two separate categories, not a unit and hence not movable. Thus we have no evidence for the claim that cliticization in English has syntactic consequences. 7 Flagg (2003) argues that Zwicky and Pullum’s analysis is “internally inconsistent,” on the grounds that if has and hasn’t are really just inflectionally distinct forms of the same word, the cliticization of has as ’s ought to imply (counterfactually) the corresponding cliticization of hasn’t as *’sn’t. No such conclusion follows, of course, since as we have seen the existence of a reduced form is a lexically idiosyncratic property of particular word forms. Has has a reduced form ’s, while hasn’t has no reduced form listed in the lexicon. No inconsistency is involved.

What is a Clitic?

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Reduced Auxiliaries and Syntactic Gaps Of course, the lack of evidence in favor of an analysis of auxiliary reduction in English as involving syntactic adjunction still does not rule out the possibility that there are syntactic conditions on the appearance of the reduced forms; and indeed there is quite a robust literature claiming that such is the case. The best-known condition of this sort is the requirement that auxiliaries do not appear in reduced form when followed by a syntactic gap. In sentences such as those in (2.23), the impossibility of a reduced form of the auxiliary appears to be correlated with the presence of an immediately following gap, which may result either from deletion or from displacement of a constituent to another position. (2.23)

a. John is taller than Harry is/*’s [e]. b. John has known Mary longer than Fred has/*’s [e] Martha. c. Who do you think you are/*’r [e]?

In one of the classics of the underground syntactic literature of the 1970s, Bresnan (1978) offered an account of this restriction. She proposed that contrary to appearances, English cliticization is actually obligatory adjunction to the right. The restriction that reduced forms cannot immediately precede a gap would then follow from a plausible constraint to the effect that the reduced auxiliaries cannot adjoin to a phonologically null element (the gap). This position has persisted in the thought of many otherwise right-thinking linguists, despite its completely counter-intuitive nature from a phonological point of view. The phonological interaction of the clitic (assimilation, in this case), after all, is with the item to the left, not the right. This direction of association is supported by the fact that the pronunciation of the clitic varies from [s] to [z] to [@z] as a function of the final sound of the preceding word (2.24a); and is completely insensitive to the shape of the word on its right. The variation in shape which we can observe is exactly the same as that seen in the shape of the regular plural ending (spelled (e)s but pronounced in the same three ways as ’s), again as a function of the final sound of the preceding word (2.24b). Similarly, while the third-person singular present ending of verbs is always spelled -s, it shows the same pattern of variation in pronunciation (2.24c), as does the ending of possessive forms (2.24d). (2.24)

a. Pat’s ([s]) leaving, Kim’s ([z]) coming in, and Chris’s ([@z]) replacing Jan. b. packs ([s]), pals ([z]), passes ([@z]) c. infects ([s]), cleans ([z]), induces ([@z]) d. Pat’s ([s]), Kim’s ([z]), Chris’s ([@z]) corkscrew

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Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

Ignoring these patent phonological facts while claiming that the reduced auxiliaries “cliticize” (invisibly) to the right is unfortunately typical of the looseness with which linguists (especially syntacticians) sometimes invoke the notion of “cliticization” as a kind of magic wand, with no requirement that it have any observable correlate. Phonologists, however, have generally been quite uncomfortable with the notion of an operation of rightward cliticization affecting English reduced auxiliaries. Apart from the obvious motivation provided by the facts in (2.24) for seeing auxiliary reduction as an operation which (at least phonologically) associates the reduced form with material to its left, it has also been pointed out that if there were (syntactic) adjunction to the right, we would expect the sequence of (reduced) auxiliary plus following word to act like a unit for purposes of deletion and movement. Examples such as those in (2.25) show that this does not happen. (2.25)

a. John’s been taking his medication every day, but Harry (*/’s been) stashing his under the mattress. b. *‘S been Kobe talking trash again?

Whatever the basis of the relation between auxiliary reduction and a following syntactic gap, it does not appear to favor an analysis on which cliticization is rightward-adjunction in the syntax. In fact, we have no reason to believe that it is a syntactic operation at all, since it has no patently syntactic consequences. This still does not resolve the problems posed by examples like those in (2.23), however. In order to maintain that the reduced auxiliaries are simple clitics in the sense that their only exceptional property is the phonological one referred to in (2.17), I must provide an account of how such apparently syntactic facts as the presence of a following gap can be relevant to their appearance. I cannot attempt to do this, however, until I have developed a much fuller account of prosodic structure, especially in English, and its relation to syntactic structure. This task will be undertaken in Chapter 3 below, where we will see that it is ultimately possible to vindicate the claim that English reduced auxiliaries are indeed simple clitics. First, however, there are two other issues that must be addressed with respect to the overall ontology of clitics and related elements. One of these is to provide at least a sketch of the nature of the second major class of clitic elements, “special clitics,” and the other is to address the outward and visible signs by which clitics can be differentiated from morphological affixes in practical terms.

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2.5 Special Clitics If “simple” clitics are elements whose only definitional property is phonological as formulated in (2.17), what should we say about Zwicky’s class of special clitics? I will return in Chapter 4 to an account of their morphosyntactic properties. It is clearly necessary to note, though, that with few exceptions (see below), these elements display the same prosodic dependency as simple clitics, in addition to whatever sets them apart from the rest of the language morphosyntactically. As far as the phonology is concerned, the analysis that follows from this is the same as for the class of simple clitics: the clitic stem is lexically characterized as prosodically deficient, while a possible non-clitic alternant (if one exists) is not. On Zwicky’s (1977) interpretation, special clitics are also related to corresponding non-clitic forms with full-word phonology and ordinary syntax. Surely, however, there is no logical requirement that a special clitic must have a non-clitic alternant, any more than that the same should hold for simple clitics. All of the characteristics of the clitic itself are ideally to be accounted for as ‘local’ properties of that element (assuming of course that we eventually come up with an appropriate account of the morphosyntax, as promised). And indeed, there are many special clitics that do not correspond in any obvious way to non-clitic elements: consider connective particles such as the secondposition clitic =te ‘and’ in the Homeric example (1.1) for instance. Indeed, it is questionable whether there is ever a special relationship (beyond nearsynonymy) between clitics and non-clitics. In particular, there is probably less reason than Zwicky assumed to treat “conjunctive” and “disjunctive” forms (e.g., French me versus moi) as synchronically alternant forms of the same lexical item. I propose, then, to define a second dimension of clitic-hood as in (2.26), without reference to any property apart from an element’s unusual morphosyntax. (2.26) Morphosyntactic clitic: a linguistic element whose position with respect to the other elements of the phrase or clause follows a distinct set of principles, separate from those of the independently motivated syntax of free elements in the language. As opposed to the case of phonological clitics, this definition requires considerably more fleshing out. In particular, we need a substantive account of the kinds of positioning principle that may govern the location of morphosyntactic clitics, their place within the overall architecture of a grammar, and their relation to other areas of structure (specifically, the lexicon, morphology,

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and syntax). I will address those matters in Chapters 4 and following; for the present, I will simply assume that the cases for which such treatment is required can be identified. I will in general use Zwicky’s term special clitic for elements designated by (2.26), although it is important to remember that (a) the additional requirement of a matched non-clitic form should be dropped from the original definition; and (b) most special clitics are phonological clitics, as well: that is, they display the property in (2.17) as well as that in (2.26). This observation, in fact, allows us to accommodate another apparent anomaly in Zwicky’s (1977) system: special clitics that are not prosodically deficient. Examples include standard Italian loro8 ‘to them’ or Tagalog tayo ‘we (dual)’. Whatever is at the heart of the distinctive morphosyntax of special clitics, it is apparently orthogonal to the prosodic property displayed by phonological clitics. The important point to note is that some special clitics, while displaying the relevant special morphosyntax, do not happen to be prosodically weak. These can be presumed to have full prosodic structure, despite displaying morphosyntactic behavior which is (also) associated with prosodically weak items. While the properties in (2.17) and (2.26) often coincide, and morphosyntactic clitics are typically also phonological clitics, these notions are logically separable, and empirically distinct. On the present account, the special class of bound words disappears as an independent category. These are simply elements whose lexical representation is always prosodically weak (or deficient). They can be divided into two classes: those with special morphosyntax, and those without. There is no reason to believe that this distinction is correlated with any other interesting distinguishing property, however. In later work (cf. Zwicky and Pullum 1983), Zwicky also abandons the independent class of “bound words,” though with little discussion. In any event, the simpler ontology adopted here has the merit of being grounded in the theory of grammar, rather than being just a set of descriptive categories. This, of course, is just what Zwicky (1985 and elsewhere) counsels: presystematic tests and descriptive labels eventually have to be cashed out in terms of theoretical constructs. 8 The classification of this element as a clitic is a chronic problem: see Cardinaletti (1991) and Nespor (1994) among other sources for discussion. In brief, loro displays some of the properties of other pronominal clitics in Italian, while differing in others. It appears following the verb with which it is associated, for instance, while other clitic pronouns precede the (finite) verb. Despite this, loro clearly does not display the syntax of a free nominal expression. Ultimately, these differences should be resolved by providing an account of the element’s atypical distribution in terms of its atypical prosody, a matter I will not attempt here.

What is a Clitic?

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2.6 Clitics and Affixes We now have a reasonable understanding of what clitics are: they are linguistic elements that display prosodically deficient phonology, anomalous morphosyntax, or both. The comparisons to this point have been between clitics and ordinary, non-clitic words, but another contrast to consider is that between clitics and word-internal affixes. After all, if a distinguishing property of (most) clitics is the fact that they form a (prosodic) word with other material, we need to be able to distinguish them from other word-forming elements. The locus classicus for these matters is Zwicky and Pullum’s (1983) examination of the ways in which we distinguish, in practice, between clitics and affixes. They propose a number of tests for separating the two, summarized in (2.27). (2.27)

a. Clitics have a low degree of selection with respect to their hosts; affixes a high degree of selection. b. Affixed words are more likely to have accidental or paradigmatic gaps than host+clitic combinations. c. Affixed words are more likely to have idiosyncratic shapes than host+clitic combinations. d. Affixed words are more likely to have idiosyncratic semantics than host+clitic combinations. e. Syntactic rules can affect affixed words, but not groups of host + clitic(s). f. Clitics, but not affixes, can be attached to material already containing clitics.

As formulated, these points are merely descriptive observations about differences in the behavior of two pre-systematically understood classes of item. Some linguists9 content themselves with lists of behavioral properties of this sort, considering such a more or less comprehensive diagnostic symptomatology to constitute an analysis of a phenomenon. A list like (2.27), however, does not represent an explanation: rather, it lays out what is to be explained. Let us then see if we can ground these differences in the analytic framework I have proposed for studying clitics. Some minimally controversial assumptions about the architecture of a grammar will suffice for that purpose. First, I assume that words are built (including affixation) within the lexical phonology. As a result, affixation processes have access to the form and meaning of stems, and can depend on 9

Not Zwicky and Pullum, I hasten to point out.

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Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

(and affect) this in idiosyncratic ways. Second, words are combined with one another post-lexically, through the syntax. On the assumptions of the Lexicalist Hypothesis (cf. Anderson (1992)), the syntax does not manipulate or have access to the internal form of words—in the sense of lexical items, which may or may may not be coextensive with the P(rosodic) Words that concern the phonology. After a syntactic structure has been developed,10 it is then subject to the rules of the post-lexical phonology which map it to P(honetic) F(orm). Clitics enter the structure in two ways. Simple clitics, since they are ordinary lexical items that happen to be unusual from a phonological point of view, are combined with other items in the sentence by the ordinary mechanisms of the syntax: hence, post-lexically. Special clitics are not the province of the ordinary syntax—that is what makes them ‘special’—but I assume that they are nonetheless introduced into the structure post-lexically. Specifically, I will argue in Chapters 4 and 6 below that they are introduced as phonological modifications of the (post-Spell-Out) shape of phrases, similar to the modifications made in words by the Word Formation Rules of the morphology. That precise mechanism is not important at this point, however—the only important claim is that special clitics are also introduced post-lexically. From these architectural assumptions, the facts in (2.27) can be derived as theorems. Property (2.27a), for example, tells us that while affixes may be associated only with lexically idiosyncratic classes of bases, clitics attach to any host, depending only on its position in the structure or at most, its basic lexical category.11 This follows immediately from the fact that affixation is a lexical process, and has access to individual word-level properties, while clitics appear only post-lexically, where they have access only to syntactic structure. Essentially the same result holds for (2.27b,c,d). Elements introduced in the lexicon (affixes and other modifications performed by Word Formation Rules) can behave differently in construction with different lexical items, while elements introduced post-lexically (clitics) have no opportunity to refuse selectively to appear (in the case of gaps) or to make item-specific modifications of form or content, since they have no access to the internal properties of the specific lexical elements with which they combine. Property (2.27e) refers to the fact that while a lexical base is affected by syntactic rules of movement, deletion, etc. together with its affixes as a unit, 10 Possibly the mapping from syntax to PF takes place in “phases” as certain portions of the structure are completed, with the results combining with one another in later phases (Chomsky (2001)). This refinement of the view suggested here is not directly relevant to the matters under discussion in this section, however. 11 Items such as wanna in English represent lexicalized combinations of specific items, rather than a clitic attaching to specific host. See section 3.4 for some discussion.

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movement or deletion of a host does not have corresponding consequences for clitics dependent on it. The fact that the syntax treats affixed words as units follows directly from the Lexicalist Hypothesis, since (on that approach), the syntax has no choice in the matter: it cannot even see the base and the affixes as distinct elements. On the other hand, clitics and their hosts do not in general form constituents, and since these are the currency in which the syntax trades, it has (in general) no opportunity to affect clitic–host combinations in a unitary way. Finally, (2.27f ) also follows from the Lexicalist Hypothesis. Clitics are introduced post-lexically, after lexical items are spelled out, and at this point the internal structure of lexically formed items is no longer visible. As a result, clitics could not possibly be introduced among the affixes of a word. Similarly, lexical affixation is already complete at the point clitics arise, so affixes could not be introduced to a form which “already” hosts a clitic. It is perfectly possible, however, for new clitics to attach to a prosodic word which already hosts other clitics—no architectural considerations bear on this issue, though other considerations (phonological and/or morphosyntactic) may limit the extent of clitic accumulation in a given language. The tests in (2.27) are thus thoroughly grounded in the structure of natural language, and the evidence they provide is correspondingly quite strong. On this basis, Zwicky and Pullum (1983) argue for an initially quite surprising conclusion: English contracted negative forms in -n’t (isn’t, doesn’t, don’t, won’t, etc.) actually represent an inflection (restricted to have, be, and auxiliary verbs in Modern English) rather than a clitic form of not. The modern status of -n’t in English appears to have arisen by way of the following stages, on the basis of fairly straightforward reanalysis at each stage. First, in Old English, negation was expressed by the full word combination n¯a wiht ‘no thing’, reduced to nought, and by Middle English, not. This word was presumably an adverb at this stage in the language, and appeared in adverbial positions subject to semantic considerations based on its scope. At this point, however, its semantics had been reduced to that of a logical operator expressing negation. Partly as a consequence of this reduced semantic content, it was subject to de-emphasis and consequent phonological reduction in many instances, leading to a simple clitic form [nt]—a phonological alter" and the fact that (for nant of full word not. Given its semantics, however, reasons based on its logical scope) it generally appeared at the left edge of VP, immediately preceded by an auxiliary element in Infl if one was present, it could be reanalyzed as a special clitic, attached at the left edge of a VP bearing a feature [+Neg]—or at the right edge of the immediately preceding Infl. But a special clitic at the right edge of Infl could easily be reanalyzed, in its turn, as

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an inflectional affix associated with the verbal elements found in that position: have, be, and the auxiliary verbs. Many details remain to be filled in and substantiated concerning this historical scenario, but it seems plausible. While the conclusion that -n’t represents an inflectional affix and not a clitic is somewhat remarkable at first glance, the case is actually quite clear on more detailed examination. Along lines similar to those that yield the tests in (2.27), another paper (Zwicky (1985)) proposes a number of additional tests, this time for distinguishing clitics from full words. I will not address these in detail, because most of them follow quite directly from the understanding of clitics articulated above. One exception is the principle that clitics are generally ordered rather rigidly, while words often are not. This is a matter that can only be addressed in the context of a better theory of what it is that is special about special clitics, and I will return to it in later chapters. Interestingly, much of this paper concerns yet another kind of object in traditional descriptive practice that has something in common with clitics: the “particle.” Zwicky dispels the idea that ‘particle’ is an additional word class (like noun and verb), or that particles have no category at all. The conclusion is that some of these elements are just members of heavily restricted word classes (often adverbs), some are simple clitics, and some are special clitics. Attending to the broad class of ‘particles’ highlights the existence of clitics (simple and special) other than the grammatical markers (such as tense markers, pronominals, negation, etc.), which have attracted most of the attention in the clitics literature. Many things that are effectively dismissed descriptively by being designated as ‘particles’ have considerable semantic content. This is true, for example, of the objects Zwicky calls “discourse markers.” These observations suggest that from a descriptive point of view, there are (at least) two somewhat different kinds of clitic element: grammatical markers, and semantically content-ful ones. I will eventually want to draw an analogy between this difference and that between inflection and derivation in morphology, and I return to this matter in Chapters 4 and 6. At this point, I have developed a general picture of the kinds of clitics that ought to be accounted for by grammatical theory, and some notions of how that might be done, at least for the phonological dimension of clitic-hood. In the following chapter, I turn to a closer examination of the prosodic bases of phonological cliticization. In the course of that discussion, we will arrive at a resolution of the problem posed by the English auxiliaries discussed above in section 2.4, showing that their unusual properties can indeed be reduced to their nature as phonological clitics.

3 The Phonology of Cliticization Let us proceed on the assumption that the proposal to analyze English reduced auxiliaries as simple (phonological) clitics in Chapter 2 is on target. To take that idea from a gleam in the eye to a genuine analysis, however, we need a more articulated theory of how the prosodic structure of utterances is organized, as well as how that structure is related to syntactic structure. It makes sense to address the nature of prosody first, beginning with the set of proposals made by various authors (especially Selkirk (1981, 1984, 1995), as well as Nespor and Vogel (1986)) concerning prosodic organization. Excellent summaries of these issues, including reference to their application to clitics, are to be found in Peperkamp (1997) and Vigário (2003).

3.1 Prosodic Structure Classical Generative Phonology as incarnated in Chomsky and Halle’s (1968) The Sound Pattern of English (SPE) made two broad assumptions about representations, whose repudiation has since been the source of much phonological theorizing. One of these concerned the interface between the syntax and the phonology. The claim that (morpho)syntactic organization is relevant to the operation of the phonology, originating in Chomsky, Halle, and Lukoff (1956), led the phonologists of the 1960s to assume that this connection should be implemented by allowing the rules of the phonology to refer directly to syntactic structure.1 I will return to the appropriate characterization of these interactions in section 3.3 below. First, though, my concern is with another basic assumption of the SPE theory: the claim that phonological representations are matrices of features, whose only internal organization is given by the rows and columns of a matrix with no further hierarchical structure. The division of the representation into units such as syllables, morphemes, words, phrases, etc., was carried out (to the extent it was deemed significant) by the introduction of quasi-segmental 1 Since most work of this period assumed that the morphological structure of words was simply the extension of syntactic mechanisms to smaller domains, “syntax” also includes “morphology” here.

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boundary elements with specific positions internal to the sequence of segments. Potato, for instance, might be represented as in (3.1), where “D” is the voiced flap characteristic of American English, and “$” represents a syllable boundary. (3.1)

[p@$théj$Do]

Kahn (1976) argued that the boundary-element approach to phonological units larger than the segment (specifically, the syllable) had a number of deficiencies that could be remedied by adopting a looser, Autosegmental picture (Goldsmith 1979). Instead of identifying syllables as stretches of segments between two instances of an appropriate boundary element, Kahn proposed treating them as structural units in their own right, constituting a structural tier linked to segmental units in a potentially many-to-many fashion. On that view, the representation in (3.1) is replaced by that in (3.2). (3.2)

σ

σ

σ

p@

thej

Do

The details of this picture did not remain in place for long, but it served to establish the idea that syllables ought to be treated as structural units—and with it, the possibility that phonological representations have hierarchical internal organization rather than being simply a succession of structurally equivalent units (segments and boundaries). And this, in turn, opened the doors for the more fundamental revisions that lie at the heart of modern views of prosodic organization. If the nature of syllables motivated a hierarchical organization of the string of segments, why stop there? In his 1975 dissertation, Mark Liberman arrived at a vastly superior representation of stress by assuming that the syllables themselves were organized into larger constituents, and that a relation defined on this structure was the right way to interpret the phonetically slippery concept of “stress.” This work is best known from its presentation in Liberman and Prince (1977); the result is a picture on which potato is represented as in (3.3). (3.3)

PWord w s Foot s w σ σ σ p@

thej

Do

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Actually, the representation in (3.3) is somewhat anachronistic in providing labels such as “PWord” and “Foot” for the constituents above the level of the syllable. Liberman and Prince simply grouped constituents together into higher-order units (recursively), but the provision of a principled inventory of structural types for these units would follow shortly. The Prosodic Hierarchy Telescoping the history somewhat, work of Selkirk (1981, 1984) and Nespor and Vogel (1986) proposed a range of additional constituent types intermediate between segments (or features) and whole utterances. Syllables (σ )2 are seen as organized into feet (Ft), feet into phonological (or prosodic) words (PW(or)d),3 words into phonological phrases (PPh), phonological phrases into intonational phrases (IPh),4 and intonational phrases into whole utterances. Implicit in these theories, and necessary to make them really significant, is the assumption that the prosodic organization they impose is an exhaustive one. We can make this explicit as the convention in (3.4). (3.4)

Full Interpretation: In order to be well-formed at PF (i.e., pronounced), phonetic content has to be incorporated into prosodic structure.

That is, stray phonological material not connected ultimately to the root of the prosodic tree is not interpretable, and therefore disallowed. Central to this work is the claim that “Foot,” “PWord,” etc., are not simply labels, but represent substantive categories with properties of their own that distinguish them. Among these properties is the assertion that each constituent type (syllable, foot, word, phrase, etc.) defines a kind of domain. At least for Nespor and Vogel, phonological rules are expressed with respect to the domain of their application. Thus, where two feet are joined into a word, foot-level rules will apply to each foot separately, while word-level rules will apply to 2 Syllables themselves have an internal organization as well, but those matters do not concern us at this point. 3 This constituent is called the Phonological Word by some authors, and the Prosodic Word by others, without entailing any significant difference. The abbreviation “PW(or)d” employed in this book may be interpreted either way, as the reader chooses. As a phonological/prosodic construct, this constituent is not to be identified with the Morphosyntactic or Lexical unit “Word,” though of course the two are often co-extensive. 4 Whether only a single phrasal constituent type, the PPh, intervenes between the PWd and the IPh has been a matter of some controversy in the literature, and it is possible that more than one type of PPh must be recognized. This matter is not relevant to the concerns of this book, however. One specific intermediate constituent type, the Clitic Group, will be specifically discussed and rejected below.

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their combination as a unit. As a result, the specific label given to a constituent formed at a given point has consequences. An example where the correct assignment of prosodic structure is crucial to getting the (non-prosodic) phonology right is provided by Polish, as discussed by Booij and Rubach (1987). Polish has a number of rules which affect the voicing of obstruents, especially in clusters. One of these devoices a fricative following another voiceless obstruent, as formulated5 in (3.5).
 +Obst −→ [−Voice] / [−Voice] (3.5) Progressive Devoicing: + Cont The domain of the rule in (3.5) is the PWord. Progressive Devoicing applies (lexically) within words, as shown by alternations such as listw+a [l’istf+a] ‘board’; listew+ek [l’istev+ek] (diminutive, gen. pl.) from the stem /list˘ıv/. It does not, however, apply across the boundaries between words within larger constituents such as the Phonological Phrase. Another rule requires that clusters of obstruents agree in voice when formed within the larger unit of the Phonological Phrase. Clusters that would disagree are adjusted regressively, as expressed by the rule in (3.6).
 +Obst (3.6) Voice Assimilation: [+Obst] −→ [αVoice] / αVoice As a rule of the PPhrase level, Voicing Assimilation applies across word boundaries (though not across phrase boundaries), as illustrated by the examples in (3.7) where the orthographic form indicates the basic value of voicing. (3.7)

a. sklep [bv] warzywny ‘green-grocer’s’ b. krysys [zg] gospodarczy ‘economic crisis’ c. zakaz [sp] postoju ‘no parking’ d. szereg [kk] krzeseł ‘row of chairs’

Yet another rule devoices obstruents at the end of a word as expressed in (3.8), where the “#” element is an ad hoc indication of final position. (3.8)

Final Devoicing: [+Obst] −→ [−Voice] /

#

The effects of Final Devoicing are seen when the word is phrase final, or when the next word begins with a sonorant, as in the examples in (3.9). (3.9)

a. z˙ aba ‘frog (fem. nom. sg.)’; z˙ ab [p] (gen. pl.) b. głazy ‘stones’; głaz [s] lodowcowy ‘glacier stone’

5 The regularities of Polish discussed below are formulated as traditional rules, following the presentation in Booij and Rubach (1987). They could also be expressed by rankings within a constraint system in an Optimality Theoretic framework, though such a reformulation seems unnecessary for my purposes here.

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When the following word within the PPhrase begins with an obstruent, whatever effect Final Devoicing might have is of course obliterated by the operation of Voicing Assimilation. Rules (3.5) and (3.8) apply within the PWord domain, while rule (3.6) applies within the PPhrase domain. Each rule must be associated with a particular prosodic constituent type in order to apply correctly, a situation also illustrated for a variety of languages by examples in Selkirk (1980, 1984) and Nespor and Vogel (1986), among many other works in this tradition. In Polish, there is a set of exceptions to the behavior of final obstruents as described above. Specifically, prepositions followed by their complements do not devoice before sonorants, as illustrated in (3.10). (3.10)

a. pod [d] owocem ‘under the fruit’ b. nad [d] rowem ‘over the ditch’ c. bez [z] namysłu ‘without thinking’ d. od [d] mleka ‘from milk’

The explanation of this fact follows from the characterization of rule (3.8) as a regularity of the PWord domain. The generalization is that final devoicing is PWord final. The prepositions in (3.10) are phonological clitics, and as such do not constitute phonological words. The prosodic structure is thus as given in (3.11). (3.11)

[ [ pod[ owocem]]] PPhr PWd PWd vs. [ [ głaz (→s)][ lodowcovy]] PPhr PWd

PWd

Both Selkirk (1984) and Nespor and Vogel (1986) go beyond the association of different domains with distinct phonological behavior, proposing a set of specific conditions that came to be known as the prosodic hierarchy condition. One central aspect of this is the claim that in moving up the tree from segments to complete utterances, constituent types are layered in the sense of increasing monotonically in scope. For instance, Feet cannot contain PWords or PPhrases, PWords cannot contain PPhrases, etc. Somewhat more controversially, Nespor and Vogel (1986) claim that the analysis is exhaustive and non-recursive at each step. That is, every bit of phonological content dominated by a constituent of a given type has an analysis as part of a constituent of the immediately lower type. Thus, Phonological Phrases may not contain syllables that are not part of some Foot, which in turn is part of some PWord, etc. As a result, the representation of potato in (3.3) above would be excluded, because it involves a syllable that is analyzed directly as a constituent of a PWord without being part of any Foot.

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The correctness of this assertion (known as the “Strict Layer Hypothesis,” to which I will return below in section 3.2) is certainly not self-evident, or even, perhaps, all that plausible, and much subsequent work has rejected it. Nonetheless, it serves as quite a useful starting point for discussion, since it is about as restrictive as one could imagine. Whatever we may find out about prosodic structure empirically, it can probably be understood as involving potential relaxation of the conditions just discussed. These matters are of direct significance for an analysis of phonological clitics, as indeed should already be evident from the Polish facts cited above. Phonologists dealing with the structure of the prosodic hierarchy have generally thought of cliticization in terms of the formation of prosodic constituents. Clitics differ from non-clitics in being combined with other material into a single prosodic unit, (e.g., the PWord in the Polish example) rather than being autonomous units themselves. On this account, much of the phonology of cliticization comes down to the principles of prosodic organization and their consequences. The Clitic Group One of the more controversial aspects of the prosodic hierarchy as described by Nespor and Vogel 1986 (apart from the exhaustivity claim just discussed, to which I will return below) was a particular specific level of prosodic structure which they assumed. Following a suggestion from Bruce Hayes, they posit a special kind of constituent composed of a sequence of clitics together with their host. This unit, the Clitic Group, was assumed to be intermediate between PWords and PhPhrases. A Clitic Group is constructed by combining a nonclitic word with any suitable adjacent clitics. “Suitable” here refers to the notion that some clitics are lexically specified to attach in only one direction.6 Otherwise, clitics form a Clitic Group with the host with which they share the most syntactic structure. This looks rather innocuous, but in the overall context of the prosodic hierarchy, it involves several claims that have been questioned by others in subsequent work. First of all, clitics have to be distinguishable from non-clitics at the point prosodic organization is built. And notice that, given the strong form of the prosodic hierarchy assumed here, this distinction cannot be a prosodic one, because clitics have to be PWords themselves by virtue of the exhaustivity condition, a problem first noted by Booij (1988). Furthermore, Clitic Groups (like any other prosodic constituent type) are predicted to have idiosyncratic 6

This is also assumed in various forms by Klavans (1985), Zec (1987), Inkelas (1989), and some other authors. I will suggest in later sections of this chapter that this type of lexical specification can probably be eliminated.

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phonology, and not simply that of phrases or other constituents. Finally, this theory provides only one structural way for a clitic to be related to its host, prosodically: as sister PWord within a Clitic Group. To the extent different clitics in different languages relate prosodically to their hosts in different ways, such an analysis is too restrictive. What arguments do Nespor and Vogel offer for the existence of the Clitic Group as a separate prosodic category? In the first instance, they must show that Clitic Groups have special phonological properties that cannot be assimilated to those of other constituent types. In this connection, they cite the example of stress in Modern Greek, noted above in section 2.3. They observe that when words are combined into a single word in a compound, the result has only one stress, which may not be the same as either in isolation: [kúklo]+[spíti]→[kuklóspito] ‘doll’s house’; [níxta]+[pulí]→[nixtopúli] ‘night-bird (owl)’. When clitics are added to a host, in contrast, we may get extra stresses. In simple cases, enclitics do not get stress. Thus, the stress pattern of [ðóse] ‘give!’ is preserved when a clitic is added to yield [ðósemu] ‘give me!’ But as we have already seen, when two separate enclitics are added, an additional stress appears as in [ðósemúto] ‘give it to me!’ Nespor and Vogel suggest that this is due to a rule of stress readjustment whose domain is the Clitic Group. This argument does not succeed, however, as pointed out by Zec and Inkelas (1992) and Peperkamp (1997). We need to say that stress in compounds, as in simple words, is governed by some set of lexical principles, building metrical (foot) structure within a PWord. With respect to these rules, compounds count as a single domain of the relevant type. The main stress within such a PWord is associated with a binary (disyllabic) Foot constructed at the right edge of the word, allowing a single following syllable that is not part of that Foot. The generalization that results is that at most two unstressed syllables may follow the main stress within the PWord. Suppose that we have metrified a host word (e.g., [ðóse] ‘give!’) in this way, and we now adjoin some additional material, such as a single clitic (yielding, e.g., [ðósemu] ‘give me!’). This form conforms to the stress regularity of the Modern Greek PWord, since its main stress foot is followed by only one additional syllable. If we add two clitics, however, as in [ðósemúto] ‘give it to me!’ the additional material will cause the generalization “No sequences of unstressed syllables after the main stress Foot” to be violated. What happens, as we have already seen, is that existing foot structure is maintained, but a new Foot is built following the original main stress Foot, since there are now at least two syllables to work with (the minimum for constructing a well-formed Foot in the language).

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On this analysis, no special property needs to be assigned to the Clitic Group that would distinguish it from the PWord. The behavior of host-plusclitic sequences can be seen as due to the interaction of the lexical rules of stress (which apply to simple words and to compounds, both of which are domains of type PWord) with a post-lexical rule that applies when phonological words with unstressed sequences arise in the syntax (hence post-lexically). No distinct constituent type need be recognized for this account to go through. The Modern Greek situation can be contrasted with what happens in some Italian dialects (and Latin), where the basic stress pattern takes the presence of a clitic into account. For example, Lucanian vínn ‘sell!’; v nníll ‘sell it!’; vinn míll ‘sell me it!’ display stress that remains consistently penultimate in the form including all clitics. Here we simply say that the basic stress rule is post-lexical, and no metrical structure is built lexically. Again the behavior of host-plus-clitic groups can be described without assuming a distinct constituent type, on the assumption that prosodic structure can be built lexically, post-lexically, or both. The most interesting theory of the phonological behavior of clitics is surely one that says as little as possible specifically about these items, while getting their properties to fall out from other factors. In that sense, eliminating the Clitic Group is a desirable move. The examples Nespor and Vogel provide, as well as those offered by Hayes (1989) and Vogel (1990), seem to be eliminable if we recognize a difference between lexical and post-lexical phonology. Other potential examples of unique properties of the Clitic Group disappear as a result of the fact that within a PWord, the boundaries of included PWords can be visible to rules, allowing us to distinguish among [[X] [Y]], [X [Y]] and [X Y]. Since positive arguments in favor of the Clitic Group as a prosodic category are lacking, and the other restrictive claims mentioned above that result from positing this category within the overall system turn out not to be correct (as argued by Zec and Inkelas 1992), most authors have abandoned it as a part of the prosodic hierarchy.7 e

e

e

e

e

3.2 Dimensions of Phonological Cliticization Let us assume that the phonology of cliticization is to be understood within the following scenario: a lexically interpreted surface structure is interpreted by a hierarchical structure of prosodic units within which lexical and functional material appears. That structure is built in a way that reflects, at least in 7 See Booij (1988, 1996) for further discussion of reasons to reject the Clitic Group as part of the prosodic hierarchy.

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part, the syntactic structure, and serves as the input to the post-lexical phonology.8 A framework for talking about the phonology of cliticization, based on the combination of Lexical Phonology and Prosodic Phonology, would go as follows: (3.12)

a. Lexical principles9 determine the phonological shapes of lexical items (members of lexical categories). This includes assigning prosodic structure to them, up to the level of the PWord, as argued by Booij (1988). b. Post-lexical principles govern the relation between syntactic (S-)structure and the prosodic organization of the whole utterance. This includes building structure above the level of the PWord, and also incorporating material that (for whatever reason) is not already part of a PWord, so as to satisfy Full Interpretation (3.4). c. Post-lexical phonological adjustments apply to the resultant structure.

If we think of (phonological) cliticization in these phonological terms, it becomes a matter of describing the ways in which clitics are incorporated into prosodic structure along with non-clitic elements, together with the phonological adjustments that may apply to the resulting structures. In these terms, the questions that must be answered include those in (3.13). (3.13)

• How do we distinguish clitics from non-clitics? • For a given clitic, how is its host to be identified? • What structure results from the combination of a clitic with its nonclitic host?

With respect to the first of these questions, I have already suggested that the best theory would be one on which there is no specific property such as “[±Clitic]” unique to clitics, but rather where clitics are distinguished from non-clitics in terms of some independently available dimension within the phonology. The proposal of section 2.3 in the previous chapter follows exactly this program, within the architecture of (3.12) above. Non-clitic lexical words are assigned prosodic structure up to the level of the PWord within the Lexical Phonology. (Phonological) clitics, in contrast, are “prosodically deficient” in the sense that they do not have PWord structure at the point they are I will return to the nature and content of this relation in section 3.3 below. This formulation is intended to be neutral between the expression of such principles as rewriting rules or as a ranked set of constraints within Optimality Theory. 8 9

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introduced into S-structure. To satisfy Full Interpretation, they must be incorporated into PWords or some other constituent in the prosodic structure, together with the associated lexical material, in the post-lexical phonology.10 For the present, I will assume that a unique host can be identified for a given clitic, a matter to which I return in section 3.3. For any given hostplus-clitic combination, there are essentially four formal possibilities as to the prosodic structure that might result from combining them, as Selkirk (1995) points out.11 (3.14)

a. PWord Clitic:

b. Free Clitic:

PPh PWd

PWd

Host

Clitic

PPh PWd Host

Clitic

c. Internal Clitic:

PPh PWd Host

d. Affixal Clitic:

Clitic

PPh PWd PWd Host

Clitic

The first of these, the PWord clitic, is the case where the clitic is assigned independent status as a PWord in the phonology. A Free clitic is associated (as a non-PWord) with its host within the PPhrase. An Internal clitic is incorporated into the same PWord as its host, as opposed to an Affixal clitic, which is adjoined to the host to form a recursive PWord structure. While all of these structures are logically and formally possible, however, it remains to be shown which of them are actually instantiated in natural languages, and how to distinguish among them in the phonology of a particular language to the extent that more than one possibility is admitted by Universal Grammar. 10 This is far from an original proposal. Previous work that treats the properties of phonological clitics in essentially the same way includes Berendsen (1986); Selkirk (1986, 1995); Zec (1988); and Inkelas (1989), among others. 11 These possibilities are of course independent of the linear order of the clitic with respect to its host. For the sake of concreteness, I represent the specific case of enclitics here.

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The Strict Layer Hypothesis Two of the formal possibilities in (3.13) above violate the Strict Layer Hypothesis, as this was informally described in section 3.1. Free clitics involve structures in which some of the material dominated by a PPhrase is not part of a PWord, while Affixal clitics involve recursion of PWords. The empirical question of whether such structures are ever motivated thus bears on the plausibility of the Strict Layer Hypothesis itself. Inkelas (1989) argued that this claim, as it appeared originally in work such as Selkirk (1984) and Nespor and Vogel (1986), should not be treated as a monolithic notion, but rather broken down into a number of logically independent claims. Some of these are inherent in the nature of the prosodic hierarchy itself. That theory of representations claims not only that prosodic constituent types are drawn from a limited universal inventory, but also that (unlike, say, the constituent types that appear in syntactic representations, such as DP, NP, VP, etc.) there is a specific ordering relation defined over them. (3.15)

σ < Foot < PWord < PPhrase < IntPhrase < Utterance

Associating positions on this ordering with consecutive integers, we could express the basic nature of the prosodic hierarchy as involving two fundamental requirements. (3.16)

Layeredness: No C i dominates a C j where j > i (e.g., no Foot contains a PWord) Headedness (first approximation): Every C i directly dominates some C i−1 (e.g., every PWord contains a Foot)

The Strict Layering Hypothesis can be expressed as the claim that representations also meet two other requirements. (3.17)

Exhaustivity: No C i directly dominates a C j where j < i − 1 (e.g., no PWord directly dominates a σ ) Non-recursivity: No C i directly dominates another C i (e.g., no PWord contains another PWord; adjunction structures do not exist)

In order to maintain its logical independence from Non-recursivity, the formulation of Headedness in (3.16) should be replaced by the following. (3.18)

Headedness: Every C i directly dominates some C j where j ≥ i − 1

Layeredness and Headedness are inherent in the notion of the prosodic hierarchy, and will not be questioned here. The requirements in (3.17), however,

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make substantive claims about the range of prosodic structures found in the languages of the world, and as such, are subject to empirical confirmation. Evidence suggests, in fact, that they are violated in some instances, and this calls for some revision of the theory. The Prosodic Hierarchy as a Set of Constraints If the conditions (3.17) were always observed, then there could be only two possible outcomes of the post-lexical combination of a phonological clitic and its host: either a PWord is built over the clitic, and the two become part of the same PPhrase, or else the clitic is incorporated into an adjacent element of the next level up (a syllable into a foot, or a foot into a PWord). These are the “PWord clitics” and “Internal clitics,” respectively, of (3.14a,c). A language in which Free clitics (3.14b) appeared would violate Exhaustivity, since a syllable (or Foot) would be directly dominated by PPhrase; while a language with Affixal clitics (3.14d) would violate Non-recursivity (and perhaps Exhaustivity as well, if the clitic consisted only of a syllable). If these structures are motivated in some language(s), the theory must be amended so as not to impose the Strict Layering requirements (3.17) as absolute conditions on prosodic structure. English Function Words Selkirk (1995) argues that both of these problematic structures occur in English. She analyzes the phonology of “function words,” typically monosyllabic prepositions, determiners, auxiliary verbs, and personal pronouns. These have full forms that appear, with stress, under some conditions: in isolation, when focused (Bettina can speak, but refuses to), or in most instances when phrase final (I can [kn] eat more than Sara can [kæn, *kn]). " They also have weak forms that occur" in non-phrase-final positions. Selkirk analyzes the strong forms as cases where PWord structure is built over the item in question, either to support the phonetics of focus or because ends of phrases are preferably also ends of words. In the remaining cases, the function words enter the structure as prosodically deficient items—phonological clitics in the sense of (2.17). They must thus be integrated into prosodic structure in some way to satisfy Full Interpretation. Consider first the cases of weak monosyllabic function words that are not phrase final. Since these do not bear stress, they cannot be PWords. They cannot even be organized into feet, because the resulting structure would produce additional secondary stresses. In a phrase such as o˘r f˘or cónferences the two initial syllables are without stress, showing that neither is the head of a foot. We can conclude a fortiori that neither alone, nor the two taken together constitute a PWord, and thus the PWord clitic analysis is excluded. But then how are they grouped together with the lexical word conferences into a PPhrase? They cannot have been incorporated into the PWord [kánf@r@ns@z] as Internal clitics

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either, because English excludes sequences of two or more unstressed syllables at the beginning of a PWord. But a series of non-final phonological clitics can give rise to much longer unstressed stretches, as in o˘r f˘or a˘ c˘onvérsion. The stress patterns found with English function words in non-phrase-final position thus argue that they are attached to the PPhrase but are not part of a PWord. This is confirmed by other phenomena as well. PWord initial voiceless stops are aspirated, even when the syllable they initiate is unstressed, as in Canadian [kh@˘ néjdi@n], but this is not true of PPhrase initial function words, as in can aid (orphans) [knéjd]. It is necessary to conclude that function words that are non-final in their "phrases are phonological clitics of the type identified as Free clitics, with a structure like (3.19), the mirror image of (3.14b). (3.19)

PPhr PWd

kn eid " They must thus violate Exhaustivity, at least at the level of the PPhrase. English also contains structures involving function words structured as Affixal clitics (3.14d), Selkirk argues. Following the analysis of John McCarthy (1991) for his own Eastern Massachusetts dialect, she shows that intrusive r appears in this form of English after a PWord-final low vowel, when the following word begins with a vowel. The one class of weak function words that do not receive stress (and PWord status) when appearing in phrase-final position are weak object pronouns, as in hit’m again! In a sequence of verb plus unstressed object pronoun, the verb itself retains its status as a PWord, as shown by the fact that intrusive r appears at its right edge under appropriate conditions: sawr us, withdraw-r it. But the pronoun also behaves as if it were at the right edge of a PWord, in sequences such as I saw ya-r and asked about it. The structure of verb plus weak object pronoun is thus evidently as in (3.20), violating Non-recursivity at the level of the PWord. (3.20)

PPh PWd PWd saw

us

The conclusion that the motivated structures for phonological clitic-plushost combinations in English involve violations of the principles of Exhaustivity and Non-recursivity is by now quite well supported for a variety of other languages as well. One well-known case involves a set of Neo-Štokavian

50

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

dialects of Serbo-Croatian analyzed by Zec (1993). The properties of tonal accent in these three dialects provide a minimal triplet for phonological clitic structures. The same unstressed preposition u ‘(in)to’ combines with a following PWord such as graad ‘city’ or glaavu ‘head’ as an Internal clitic in one dialect (Eastern Herzegovina), a Free clitic in another (Belgrade), and an Affixal clitic in a third (Šrem, Maˇcva). We will see other examples of these structures later in this book. Constraint Systems We might take these examples to suggest that Strict Layering is just a “tendency,” or a matter of “markedness,” but surely that is just a cop-out. Or we might take them to show that the principles in (3.17) are just wrong. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater in that way is not satisfactory either. Selkirk suggests in each case that what is actually going on is subtler than this: the requirements in (3.17) are a part of the picture, all right, but sometimes their demands are overruled by others. Increasingly, work in phonology, morphology, and syntax shows that principles of grammar are not absolute. Rather, they are violable, true to the extent that some more important principle does not require them to be violated. This is a familiar enough notion in life . . . “Thou shalt not steal,” and we do not, at least not until we need to in order to feed our family. This is the core notion of Optimality Theory (or “OT”), which forms the basis of several recent analyses of cliticization phenomena (including Selkirk’s). The basic idea of OT is that the structure of a grammar comprises a system of ranked but violable constraints rather than a set of ordered rewriting rules. Rules and constraints provide alternative algorithms for answering the question: given the abstract (input) representation of a form, how do we determine the overt shape of its realization? The rule-based answer says: start with the input, and apply a sequence of systematic modifications to it, resulting eventually in the output. This format allows us to express a great deal, but each such modification has an all-or-nothing character to it. Either a given rule applies or it does not. Of course, another rule may apply later and obscure what this rule has done, but either it applied or it did not. Within OT, things are quite different. For any given input, the output could in principle differ from it in any arbitrary way. Therefore, again in principle, any well-formed structure within the vocabulary of phonological expressions might be the output corresponding to the given input. Taking that as the starting point, we could assume that the problem is to provide a set of “triage” conditions—the constraints—for sorting out all of these (logically) possible outputs and arriving at the most suitable: the optimal one.

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51

In those terms, we can say that the constraints may (indeed, must) be ranked. This ranking establishes a balance between two contradictory influences on the output form. On the one hand, the output should look as much like the input as possible (Faithfulness), but on the other hand, the output should also conform to general principles of Markedness. The relative rankings of specific Faithfulness and Markedness constraints determine the way these conflicts are resolved in the choice of the optimal output form. Some things in the theory of OT as it has evolved in phonology (and more recently, in syntax) are essential: notably, the description of an input–output relation as based on a ranked set of violable constraints evaluated simultaneously. Other matters are contingent, part of the specific implementation of this idea that has been widely explored in phonology. One of these is the claim of universality for constraints, a proposal which sometimes seems intended primarily to avoid the question of how specific constraints might be learned. There is clearly a general component to constraint systems, but whether everything but the ranking can be ascribed to Universal Grammar is much less obvious. A second, even more controversial claim is the principle that there is only a single step between input and output, mediated by a single ranked constraint system. Some fairly common and well-established situations in phonology, such as opaque interactions among regularities, pose very serious problems for this idea, and have led to rather convoluted supplements to the theory that have not gained wide acceptance. There are also reasons to believe that basic insights of the cyclic organization of phonology and morphology as this developed within the theory of Lexical Phonology are quite real and should be preserved, although that grammatical architecture is quite at odds with the one-step conversion process assumed in much of the OT literature. In this book, I adopt a modified version of OT, along lines developed in recent work of Kiparsky (2000, forthcoming); see also Booij (1997). Specifically, I assume a cyclic organization of the Lexical Phonology of words, where constraints operate to instantiate the phonology of a given level of the Lexical Phonology, as well as that of the Post-lexical phonology, in such a way that there is more than one constraint-satisfaction operation in the phonology as a whole. The analysis of phonological clitics is almost exclusively a matter of the Post-lexical constraint system, on this view. For particular items, several issues must be resolved. First, we must establish whether the item’s prosodic deficiency is inherent or derived by rule. I assume (with Selkirk, for instance,

52

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

among others) that items that do not belong to lexical categories are prosodically deficient, at least to the extent of not having inherent PWord structure. This follows from their not having passed through the parts of the Lexical Phonology that create such structure. Perhaps, however, some other principles (e.g., fast speech reductions) can deprive even lexical material of some of its prosodic organization. Second, we must establish the way in which phonologically clitic material is to be incorporated into the prosodic structure of neighboring material so as to satisfy Full Interpretation (3.4). At what level of prosodic structure (syllable, Foot, PWord or PPhrase) is the item attached, and what is the resulting structure? Whatever this is, it must be consistent with the prosodic hierarchy, based on the ranked categories of (3.15). Furthermore, as we discussed above, no structure in any language appears to violate the additional requirements in (3.21), and so presumably the only candidates submitted to the constraint system for evaluation conform to these. (3.21)

Layeredness: No category dominates a higher-level category. Headedness: Every category directly dominates (at least) one element no more than one level below it on the hierarchy.

The additional conditions of the Strict Layering Hypothesis can, as we have seen, be violated. Furthermore, violation may be ‘local’ in the sense that a language violating, say, Exhaustivity at the PPhrase level may nonetheless conform to this principle at other levels, such as the PWord. The relevant principles, therefore, need to be formulated as families of constraints, varying over the categories of the hierarchy as in (3.22). (3.22)

Exhaustivity(Ci ): Every element of category Ci is exhaustively composed of elements of category Ci−1 . NonRecursive(Ci ): No element of category Ci directly dominates another instance of Ci .

A description of the phonology of Stray Adjunction (in the terminology of Chapter 2) includes a ranking of these constraints (perhaps with respect to others), as well as a resolution of such other matters as the choice of a host on the left or the right, to which I return in section 3.3 below. An Example: Italian Dialects As an example of how we might describe various modes of phonological cliticization, let us review the descriptions of a set of three Italian dialects discussed by Peperkamp (1997). These provide a nice contrasting set, differing minimally in the way clitics are incorporated into prosodic structure which can be described in terms of varied rankings of

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53

the constraints seen thus far. The first of them is Neapolitan, as illustrated in (3.23). (3.23)

Neapolitan: Verb Imperative do fá tell cónta comb péttina

Imperative + ‘it’ fáll@ cóntal@ péttinal@

Imperative + ‘you’ + ‘it’ fattíll@ cóntatíll@ péttinatíll@

We can assume that PWords are built lexically over the host verbs, and then prosodically deficient clitics are added post-lexically. Note that when clitics are added, the first stress does not change except in one case (fattíll ), where we can say that the new stress appearing on the clitic sequence has the effect of suppressing the original stem stress to avoid Clash (a sequence of two adjacent stresses). Peperkamp shows that we can describe this system by saying that the clitic material is adjoined to the existing prosodic word, without modifying its structure, as in (3.24). e

(3.24)

a.

PPh

b.

PPh

PWd

PWd

PWd

PWd

F. . .

σ

F. . .

lex

cl

lex

F cl1

cl2

I assume that a single clitic is a single syllable, and not a Foot; two clitics, however, provide enough material to constitute a Foot, and thus to introduce an additional stress. Peperkamp’s discussion suggests that there are aspects of formal suppletion that require the treatment of the two-clitic sequence as a single unit, which is eligible to be a Foot. Alternatively, we could asume simply that the two monosyllabic units are introduced together, and subsequently organized into a Foot. The choice makes no difference. We can describe this system as follows. Full Interpretation, Headedness, and Layeredness are all undominated well-formedness conditions on the candidates that are to be compared, so they play no part in the ranking. It is also the case that prosodic structure assigned lexically is generally preserved, so we assume a high-ranking Faithfulness constraint to this effect. (3.25)

Prosodic Faithfulness: Prosodic structure in the input should be preserved in the output.

In the case of a monosyllabic stem followed by two clitics, however, the need to avoid successive stressed syllables is more important, so the stress on the

54

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

stem is lost as a result of the domination of Prosodic Faithfulness by another constraint (3.26).12 (3.26)

*Clash: Sequences of two consecutive stressed syllables are disallowed.

The prosodically deficient material (i.e., the clitics) must be incorporated into the structure somewhere, and there are not a lot of choices available. Incorporation into a Foot would violate well-formedness conditions on feet, as well as Faithfulness to existing prosodic structure. Incorporation into the existing PWord would also violate faithfulness. Incorporation at the PPhrase level would violate Exhaustivity(PPh). The Affixal clitic structures we actually find indicate that Exhaustivity(PPh) outranks NonRecursivity(PWd): that is, building a recursive PWord preserves the existing prosodic structure, and avoids having lower-level constituents (syllables, Feet) directly dominated by a PPhrase. The overall constraint ranking for Neapolitan is as in (3.27). (3.27)

*Clash  Prosodic Faithfulness  Exhaustivity(PPh)  NonRecursive(PWd)

Now let us compare the Neapolitan approach to Stray Adjunction with that employed in another dialect, Lucanian. (3.28)

Lucanian: a. vínn ‘sell’; v nníll ‘sell it’ e

e

e

b. rammíll ‘give me it’; mannat míll ‘send me it’ e

e

e

We see in (3.28a) that the addition of a clitic in this language causes stress to shift rightward.13 Apparently a binary trochaic foot is constructed over the last two syllables of the form, including both stem and any following clitics. The forms in (3.28b) with two clitics have this foot constructed entirely over clitic material. In this language, Stray Adjunction produces Internal clitics, sacrificing Faithfulness to maintain the Strict Layering constraints. The resulting structure for a form with two clitics is as in (3.29). (3.29)

PPh PWd Ft mannat@ mí

ll@

12 The fact that it is the first, rather than the second of two adjacent stresses that is lost must be resolved by other aspects of the prosodic phonology of Neapolitan not considered here. 13 Stress shift is responsible for the vowel alternation in these forms, with stressed [´ı] corresponding to unstressed [˘@].

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55

The constraint ranking necessary to obtain this result is (3.30). (3.30)

NonRecursive(PWd),Exhaustivity(PWd)  Prosodic Faithfulness

Let us finally compare the situation in (standard) Italian, illustrated in (3.31). (3.31)

Standard Italian: a. pórta ‘bring’, pórtami ‘bring me’ b. pórtamelo ‘bring me it’, teléfonamelo ‘telephone it to me’

Here the addition of a clitic does not alter the lexically assigned stress, suggesting that Faithfulness is highly ranked. Even when two clitics are added, as in (3.31b), the stress is not altered, and apparently no new stress is assigned even though two syllables of additional material would support the construction of a new Foot if this material were within the PWord. Apparently, then, Stray Adjunction in Standard Italian produces Free clitics by attachment to the PPhrase, as in (3.32). (3.32)

PPh PWd pórta me

lo

The required ranking is that of (3.33). (3.33)

NonRecursive(PWd),Exhaustivity(PWd),Prosodic Faithfulness  Exhaustivity(PPh)

Stray Adjunction in these three Italian dialects is thus based on different rankings of the prosodic constraints, yielding three different structural types of clitic as a reflection of these differences in their post-lexical phonology.

3.3 Prosodic Structure and Syntactic Structure In discussing the operation of phonological cliticization above, I have assumed in each case that the appropriate host for a given clitic is apparent, and that the problem is to determine how that clitic and its host relate to one another in the structure resulting from Stray Adjunction. When a clitic appears between two prosodically complete potential hosts, however, it is necessary to establish the direction in which incorporation will take place. In some cases this is a purely phonological matter, but in others it depends (at least apparently) on the syntactic structure within which the material in question appears. I turn

56

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

now to the issue of how syntactic and phonological representations interact to determine these matters. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, “classical” Generative Phonology assumed that the relation between syntactic structure and phonology was a basically simple one: phonological rules referred directly to syntactic form, and could, at least in principle, make use of any and all information they might find there. A complication recognized at least as early as Chomsky and Halle (1968), however, was that the structures provided by the syntax might not be completely appropriate for the phonology. For instance, syntactic organization tends to involve greater degrees of embedding as sentences get longer, but the division of sentences into phrases is comparatively flat. Indeed, the phrasing suggested by the syntax may not be the same as that suggested by the phonology. The classic example of this is a sentence like This is the cat that chased the rat that ate the cheese . . . , where syntactic phrasing groups nominal heads together with the following relative clause but the phrase boundaries in pronunciation come between the head and the relative clause. (3.34)

Syntax: [ This is [ the cat [ that chased [ the rat [ that ate CP

DP

CP

DP

[ the cheese [ that . . . ]]]]]]] DP

Phonology: [

CP

CP

PPh

ate the cheese] [

This is the cat][

PPh

that . . . ]

PPh

that chased the rat][

PPh

that

To accommodate such divergences, SPE assumed that a set of Readjustment Rules operated before any of the phonological rules proper, to massage the structure in various ways so as to make it appropriate for phonological interpretation. Though this notion was never pursued in any detail in the literature of the period, the principal lesson to be drawn from the necessity of such readjustments is surely that the organization of an utterance for syntactic purposes on the one hand, and for phonological ones on the other, is simply not the same. The development of prosodic phonology, as sketched in the sections above, brings this point into greater relief. If substantial hierarchical organization has to be imposed on a phonological representation for its own purposes, the need for the phonology also to consult another similar but non-identical and logically independent hierarchical structure (that provided by the syntax) is not obvious, and risks substantial redundancy where there is not actual conflict. In fact, the approach that has emerged (and which I will follow here) assumes that the role of syntactic representations in phonology is limited to providing information that may be consulted (along with other, purely

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57

phonological factors) in the construction of prosodic structure. The rules of the phonology per se only have access to the prosodic organization, and not (directly) to the syntax. Let us proceed, then, on the assumption that the only reference made in the phonology to categories and structures of the syntax is by the principles that construct prosodic organization. In the context of an OT approach to phonology, the relevant principles are Alignment constraints, which specify preferred relations between two distinct analyses of the same material. The general form of such a constraint is as in (3.35). (3.35) Align(Cati ,Edger/l ,Catj ,Edger/l ) A specific instance of this family of constraints is to be interpreted as specifying that “For any instance of Cati , its Right/Left edge should be aligned with the Right/Left edge of an instance of Catj .” Perhaps the simplest instantiation of this system is the description of the fact that lexical words project PWords in the phonology. We can express the preference for this structure in terms of the ranking of the two constraints in (3.36). (3.36)

a. Align(LexWord,L,PWord,L) b. Align(LexWord,R,PWord,R)

These say that, for any stretch of material that constitutes a lexical word, its left and right edges should be aligned with the left and right edges, respectively, of a PWord. Various other factors, however, especially the need to incorporate phonological clitics into the structure, may lead to circumstances in which this alignment is not perfectly satisfied. These are described in terms of other constraints that outrank one or the other of those in (3.36). In terms of higher-level categories, we want prosodic structure to reflect syntactic structure, in the absence of overriding factors. We can accomplish this, to a first approximation, by a similar set of constraints. (3.37)

a. Align(XP,L,PPhrase,L) b. Align(XP,R,PPhrase,R)

The constraints in (3.37) say that, ceteris paribus, syntactic phrases (at least maximal projections) should project PPhrases in the prosodic structure. Left to their own devices, these constraints would produce much the same recursive embedding in the phonology as that of the syntax, but we already know from examples like (3.34) that a rather flatter structure should be preferred. In fact, however, this will follow (to a first approximation, at least) from the presence in the grammar of the independently necessary constraint

58

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

NonRecursive(PPh) in (3.22). Unless other factors intervene, this constraint will prefer the non-recursive structure in (3.38a) to the recursive one in (3.38b). (3.38)

a. [

the cat] [

that chased the rat]

b. [

the cat [

that chased the rat]]

PPh PPh

PPh

PPh

Now let us see how this apparatus helps us describe Stray Adjunction, the incorporation of prosodically deficient material into existing structure. In many languages, Stray Adjunction prefers to follow syntactic structure, in the sense that stray material is incorporated into the neighboring constituent with which it bears the closest syntactic relation. Recall the case of weak prepositions in Polish, for example, which form a recursive PWord with the following material that constitutes (part of) their object, as in (3.11). We need to ensure that a new PWord is not introduced to project nonlexical prosodically deficient material. Assume that some form of a constraint *Struct (“Do not build structure unless necessary”), highly ranked, produces this effect for function words (where (3.36) cannot apply). Full Interpretation still requires the preposition to be incorporated into prosodic structure in some way. In this case (3.37a) requires the left edge of a PPhrase to coincide with the left edge of the PP, thus including the preposition in that PPhrase. The choices are to incorporate the stray syllable either directly into the PPhrase, or else into the following PWord, recursively (as an Affixal clitic) or not (as an Internal clitic). The constraint ranking in (3.39) will produce Affixal clitics as required for Polish. (3.39)

*Struct,Prosodic Faithfulness,Exhaustivity(PPh)  NonRecursive(PWd)

For the case in which clitic attachment follows the direction of syntactic affinity, then, we can say that the language prefers to have the edges of syntactic phrases coincide with the edges of PPhrases, as mandated by (3.37). As a result, clitics attach either as proclitics or as enclitics because the other direction would be counter-syntactic. For instance, Romance clitics are proclitic when pre-verbal, and enclitic when post-verbal, because (as I will argue in later chapters) their closest syntactic affiliation is with the verb. Consistent adjunction of a phrase-initial item to its left would require us to violate the constraint (3.37a), and in languages such as Kw akw ’ala, that is just what happens. We saw in section 2.2 that phonological clitics in that language systematically adjoin to material on their left, usually resulting in a violation of the similarity between syntactic and prosodic structure found in other

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59

languages such as Polish. It must therefore be the case that in Kw akw ’ala some other constraint outranks one or both of those in (3.37). Suppose we want to force clitics always to associate to their left, as in Kw akw ’ala. In the present system, there is no way to say that directly. But if a clitic attaches in the counter-syntactic direction, this must be because some other constraint is thereby satisfied, a constraint that (in this language) outranks (3.37a). What is gained by having the clitic attach to its left? A possibility is that this avoids having the PPhrase begin with the clitic, rather than with lexical material. On that view, we can describe Kw akw ’ala by the ranking in (3.40). (3.40)

Align(PPhrase,L,LexWord,L)  Align(XP,L,PPhrase,L)

That is, in this language it is more important to keep non-lexical material out of the left periphery of the PPhrase than it is to have syntactic and prosodic phrasing be isomorphic. The high ranking of a constraint requiring prosodic constituents to begin with lexical material can probably be connected to the fact that Kw akw ’ala is a language that has essentially no prefixes: the only exceptions to this are reduplicative elements whose content can be argued to be lexical. We can relate this situation to that in other languages where similar alignment constraints are important. In Catalan, for example, the class of ‘atonic’ prepositions including a, amb, de, en that play a role in assigning case to nominals constitute a set of simple clitics. According to Wheeler, Yates, and Dols (1999: 262), “[w]hen a finite complement clause, beginning with que ‘that’, is the object of a weak [i.e., atonic] preposition [. . . ], the weak preposition is dropped” as in the examples of (3.41). (3.41)

a. Estem contents (*de) que hagis vingut ‘We are pleased that you have come’ b. Estem contents *(de) la teva vinguda ‘We are pleased at your coming’ c. Els hem d’acostumar (*a) que no hi vagin ‘We must get them used to not going there’ d. S’ha acostumat *(a) no anar-hi ‘They have got used to not going there’

Of course we could describe this situation (as Wheeler, Yates, and Dols do implicitly) by a rule: “delete unstressed prepositions before que.” This formulation is descriptively accurate, but not particularly illuminating. We could improve on it by relating the disappearance of the (semantically empty) clitic

60

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

prepositions to a constraint requiring the left edge of a clause (CP) to coincide with the beginning of a prosodic word, assuming that NonRecursive(PWord) would force these phonological clitics to attach directly to the PPhrase as Free clitics. If it is in fact more important for CPs to begin at a word boundary than for the empty prepositions that serve to assign case to be overtly realized, we could get the facts of deletion by ranking the alignment constraint higher than a presumed constraint Max(Pfnc) requiring semantically empty structural elements to appear on the surface. (3.42)

NonRecursive(PWord),Align(CP,L,PWord,L)  Max(Pfnc)

We still need to embed this description in a fuller account of Catalan phonology, including constraints that enforce Stray Adjunction in this language in a way that otherwise aligns prosodic and syntactic structure, among other facts, but the approach seems to hold some promise. In a study which forms an important part of the background of this book, Klavans (1985) proposed a set of parameters for clitics, including one specifying the direction of their attachment. For Klavans, this directionality parameter was to be specified individually as a property of particular clitics, rather than being reducible to general properties of the language. The view presented here, in contrast, treats direction of attachment as a matter that follows from the overall prosodic properties of the language, and which is not available for lexical specification with respect to individual items. In fact, the literature provides very few instances of directional attachment of clitics which are plausibly item-specific, and even fewer explicit arguments for the necessity of such description. Nespor and Vogel (1986: chapter 5) argue such a case for some pronominal clitics in Modern Greek. They show that clitics like mu ‘me’ and to ‘it’ are proclitic to a following verb in examples like (3.43)

o ðáskalos mu= to= ípe art teacher me it said The teacher said it to me

In contrast, when used possessively, these clitics appear as enclitics to a previous word. This is illustrated in (3.44), including (3.44a), which forms a minimal pair with (3.43). (3.44)

a. o ðáskalòs =mu to= ípe art teacher me it said My teacher said it

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61

b. to prósfatò =mu árTro art recent 1sg article my recent article =mu esTímata c. ta iposiníðità art unconscious 1sg feelings my unconscious feelings d. o pio filóðoksòs =mu fílos art most ambitious 1sg friend my most ambitious friend They then suggest that in their possessive use, clitics like mu must be specified as attaching only to their left, as enclitics. This does not follow, however, within the present framework. There is a clear difference between the environment of the clitic in (3.43), on the one hand, and in (3.44) on the other. In (3.43), the Verb Phrase “me it said” surely constitutes a PPhrase separate from the subject “the teacher.” A clitic such as mu in this example, introduced as a special clitic associated with the verb ípe ‘said’ could only attach to its left by crossing the boundary between these two PPhrases. Within the DPs of (3.44), however, there is no reason to assume such a boundary between PPhrases, and thus nothing to prevent the clitic from attaching to its left as an enclitic. Suppose we say, then, that in Modern Greek (as described in Nespor and Vogel 1986) prosodically deficient elements attach to a preceding PWord as enclitics where this is consistent with PPhrase boundaries projected from the syntax, but as proclitics to a following PWord otherwise. There is then no need to say anything about the direction of attachment of any particular clitic on an item-specific basis. The motivation for Nespor and Vogel’s (1986) wish to specify the possessive markers as obligatorily enclitic may be to force them into a non-initial position within the DP, by requiring them to have a appropriate host on their left. There is no need to do that, though, if we simply treat them as special clitics introduced in second position within the DP, within the framework to be developed below in Chapter 6. From example (3.44d), it appears that “second position” in this case means “following the first full PWord,” since initial unstressed elements (articles, and the intensifier pio ‘most’) do not serve as hosts. None of this, however, requires us to specify the clitics themselves for the direction of their prosodic incorporation. In the course of a detailed description of the clitics of Dutch, Booij (1995, 1996) has argued that a very limited set of weak pronouns in that language require an item-specific indication of direction of attachment. He first establishes

62

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

that the basic direction of prosodic integration of Dutch clitics is leftward, as enclitics to a preceding host. This is true for a wide range of pronouns, determiners, and other weak elements, which he argues are incorporated as Internal clitics into the preceding PWord, adducing a substantial number of phonological phenomena in support of this analysis. The leftward attachment of clitics is attributed to general principles of Dutch prosody, and is entirely consistent with the position espoused here. Booij then notes that when clitics appear in a position where there is no possible host on their left (particularly in sentence-initial position), they attach instead as proclitics to the PWord on their right. The resulting structure, in which the clitic is adjoined to its host as an Affixal clitic, is then shown to be entirely parallel to the structure of weak derivational affixes in the language. Since the same clitic may attach either leftward (in the general case) or rightward (when necessary), he notes that these elements could not be lexically specified for a direction of attachment. Rather, that question must be determined on the basis of the way general properties of Dutch prosody affect particular structures, without regard to the identity of the individual element. There are two Dutch pronominal clitics, however, for which Booij suggests that a lexical specification of direction of attachment is necessary: the weak form ie ‘he’, [i], and its allomorph [di]. These, he argues, can only attach leftward. When no host is available on the left, they cannot be used, unlike other Dutch clitics. (3.45)

a. Komt-ie? ‘does he come?’ [ kOm][ ti] b. c. d. e.

σ

σ

*Ie komt ‘he comes’ Kan-die ‘can he’ *Die kan ‘he can’ Het gaat wel goed ‘it goes well’ [ @t][ xat] σ

σ

This argument is not decisive, however. In fact, [i] and [di] differ from the rest of the Dutch clitics in another way: they are the only ones whose weak form contains a full vowel, rather than a schwa. Syllables containing schwa are not eligible to constitute PWords by themselves in Dutch, while syllables containing a full vowel can stand by themselves, even when vowel initial like [i]. This suggests that while most of the phonological clitics of Dutch—those whose vowel is schwa—consist only of a stray syllable, [i] and [di], in contrast, constitute a stray foot. On that basis, the idiosyncrasy of [i] and [di] finds an explanation consistent with the position taken here. As Booij shows, a proclitic form integrates with its host as an Affixal clitic, as in the structure (3.46) for de keer ‘the turn’.

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PWord PWord

σ

Ft σ

d@

ker

If a clitic constituting a complete foot such as [i] or [di] were placed in the same way within this structure, the resulting initial foot would create a new initial stress within the larger PWord, violating the Dutch stress pattern or (if the original stress on the host were deleted) producing a stress pattern unfaithful to that of the input host. It seems reasonable to attribute the ill-formedness of proclitic [i] and [di] to such factors, rather than to a lexical specification for direction of attachment. Booij points out (personal communication) that there are prefixed words in Dutch, such as overkomen ‘to happen to somebody’ in which the prefix (here, over-) consists of a Foot, and this Foot bears (secondary) stress. This construction is a lexical item, however, and so the prosodic structure involved is created by the lexical phonology, not the post-lexical phonology as would be the case with the integration of a clitic such as ie into prosodic structure. If we say that a new secondary stress in a Foot preceding and adjoined to the PWord with main stress cannot be created post-lexically (though the same configuration created lexically is preserved by high-ranking Prosodic Faithfulness), we can ensure that initial ie will be blocked without having to stipulate its direction of attachment as a lexical property of the clitic. I conclude that the Dutch data do not prevent us from dispensing with Klavans’s parameter of (item-specific) directionality. Quite generally, the choice of proclitic or enclitic attachment can be made to follow from more general principles of a language’s prosodic organization. Sometimes the direction of cliticization is partially obscured by postlexical adjustments of prosodic structure. An example of this is furnished by Gallo-Romance (Old French) facts cited by Jacobs 1993. Here a clitic between the subject and the verb is generally enclitic to the preceding word, but proclitic if the following verb is vowel initial. Jacobs argues that at this point in history, the left edges of PWords coincided with the left edges of lexical words (similar to Kw akw ’ala). As a result, there was normally a PWord boundary before the Verb, causing the clitic to associate leftwards so as to produce the usual enclitic structure. On the other hand, the language also ranked highly the constraint Onset requiring syllables to have onsets. In the post-lexical phonology, this outranked the PWord–LexWord alignment constraint. When a lexical verb began with a

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vowel, the constraint violation in its initial syllable could be repaired by shifting the clitic across the PWord boundary so as to provide the requisite initial onset. Examples are given in (3.47). (3.47)

a. b. c. d. e.

Jot (= jo+te) vi ‘I saw you’ jo t’aim (= te+aim) ‘I love you’ . . . qu’il parloient einsi . . . ‘that they were speaking thus’ qu j’en recevroie tel cop ‘that I would receive such a blow from it’ Si com j’es livres sui lisant ‘Just as I am reading in books’

The post-lexical constraint ranking required to achieve this result is as in (3.48). (3.48)

OnsetAlign(PWord,L,LexWord,L),Prosodic Faithfulness

Along similar lines, Chamicuro (Parker 1999) shows a constraint (or constraint complex) requiring PWords to end in a light syllable. In this language, the (prosodically deficient) article usually attaches to the right as a proclitic, yielding a prosodic structure in harmony with that of the syntax. This situation is disturbed, however, when the preceding word ends in a heavy syllable and the article itself is light. Under those circumstances the clitic article shifts to its left prosodically, becoming an enclitic on the preceding word and thus satisfying the final light syllable requirement on that PWord. Developing the relevant constraints to express the prosodic requirements on PWords in Chamicuro would take us too far afield here, and I do not propose to formulate a complete analysis that would achieve the observed interaction between prosodic and syntactic factors, but the general lines should be clear within the system of this book.

3.4 Phonological Clitics and Cliticization in English Let us now return to the case of contracted auxiliary verbs in English, which was raised in section 2.4 of the previous chapter. Recall that I proposed to follow Kaisse in treating items like ’s, ’d as prosodically deficient lexical variants of full word forms (is, has, had, would, etc.). The problem, if we are to maintain a treatment of them as simple clitics, is to account for the distribution of these elements in terms of the phonology alone in the face of apparently syntactic restrictions on their occurrence. Within the theory adopted here, it is not possible to allow the phonology to consult the syntactic representation directly (to discover the presence of a following gap, for instance): the only way

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syntactic form can influence the phonology is through its role in constructing the prosodic representation. We need to account for the following apparent paradox. On the one hand, the reduced auxiliaries display an obvious phonological dependency on the material to their left, and no sensitivity to that on their right. On the other hand, the presence of a syntactic gap on the right precludes the use of the reduced form of the auxiliary, and requires the full (non-clitic) form, while left syntactic context is irrelevant. Finally, whatever is going on, it has to be something that follows largely from general principles, since children learn how to use the reduced auxiliaries quickly, without making mistakes and without being provided with negative data. If we reject an account on which cliticization is actually a syntactic operation, how could syntactic effects (like the presence of a gap) show up as conditions on cliticization? Let us take a hint from Kaisse’s proposal above in section 2.4, on which the choice of allomorph (i.e., determination of the possibility of the clitic form) is made after sentence prosody has been assigned. That suggests that sentence prosody might be what is really relevant. The appearance of a syntactic condition on clitic auxiliaries could be just the reflex of the effects of syntactic form on sentence prosody. A simple possibility along those lines is suggested by the core cases in which clitic forms of the auxiliary are impossible, such as (3.49). (3.49)

a. John is happier with his marriage than his wife is/*’s [e]. b. Claire has published more books than Fred has/*’s [e] articles. c. What Harry is/*’s [e] is a master of the story-teller’s art.

In the phrasing of these and similar sentences with gaps, it can be seen that in each case the potentially clitic auxiliary appears at the end of a phonological phrase. We might then note that a phrase-final verb must bear the nuclear stress of the phrase. The clitic forms of the auxiliaries, however, are prosodically ineligible to be stressed, due to their lack of phonological content (they consist of a single segment, not even a syllable). As a result cliticization, construed as choice of a clitic allomorph, will be blocked. The relevance of the gap is that its filler would otherwise follow the item in question within the phrase, and the absence of that material causes the auxiliary to be final in its phrase. While promising, this approach is probably insufficient. One problem is that it does not connect these facts with the other thing we know clearly about the contracted auxiliary forms: phonologically, they attach to a preceding word. Another is that in constructions like (3.50), the degree of stress on

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the full auxiliary verb is quite low, but that does not improve the acceptability of the clitic form. (3.50)

a. Do you know what that is/*’s [e] in the tree ahead of us? b. Pat’s happier than is/*’s [e] his brother-in-law.

It does not look as if accent per se will furnish the required explanation, though that does not mean prosodic structure is irrelevant. Recall that our problem is to account for the fact that not only are sentences like (3.51a) impossible in English, but language learners know this without ever having been explicitly told not to use reduced auxiliary forms in such positions. (3.51)

a. *Tim’s happier than Kim’s. b. Tim’s happier than Kim is.

What differentiates the unacceptable (3.51a) from its well-formed neartwin (3.51b)? The only apparent difference is in the final phrase: syntactically [VP’s [e]], in (3.51a), versus [VPis [e]] in (3.51b).14 While reflecting no distinction of syntactic structure or meaning, this does have one consequence. If each of the syntactic phrases in these examples is reflected by a PPhrase in the prosodic structure, the content of that PPhrase contains only a single phonological unit. In (3.51a) that unit is a clitic (’s), while in (3.51b) it is the full form is. As noted in section 3.2 above, Selkirk (1995) has established that (with the exception of post-verbal object pronouns) function words in English (including auxiliaries) are Free clitics, attaching directly to the PPhrase rather than having a PWord build over them. The cases she considered were those in which the function word consists of a full syllable. The contracted auxiliaries, in fact, are the only instances in which a function word consists of only a segment, not a syllable, and their phonological behavior shows that they must be integrated into prosodic structure in a different way. Let us assume that (in English, at least) stray segments can only be incorporated as parts of a syllable, not directly as constituents of a Foot, PWord, PPhrase, or higher level category. But then if Prosodic Faithfulness is ranked highly enough to require the preservation of existing syllables at the point where the clitic auxiliaries are under consideration, there is only one way to incorporate a stray segment such as one of these forms: by adjunction, as a syllabic affix to the syllable immediately to its left. The complete prosodic structure of Tim’s leaving, then, is: 14 I represent this phrase as a VP, but the category is not relevant. All that matters is the claim that the predicate of a sentence constitutes a phrase.

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The Phonology of Cliticization (3.52)

IntPhrase PPhrase PPhrase PWord

PWord

Ft σ

Ft

σ

tIm

z

σ

σ

lij

viN

We know that adjoined structures at the level of the syllable are possible. English syllables have a structure which is rather tightly constrained internally; but much that is valid about the sequences of segments that are possible in codas, and about relations between nucleus and coda, is violated by syllables containing the “syllabic affixes” /z/ and /d/. Final clusters such as that in texts [tEksts] occur only under these circumstances, and it seems reasonable to regard the syllabic affixes as adjoined to the basic syllable, rather than incorporated into it. The adjoined structure is the one assigned to a number of diverse constructions in English: regular plurals and past tenses, as well as the thirdperson singular present of regular verbs, all formed in the morphology; possessives such as Rick’s office, formed in the syntax, and sequences of a host word plus reduced auxiliary clitic. All display the same relation to normal syllable structure, and all display the same phonological modifications of the sequences that result (cf. (2.24) in section 2.4 above). Adjunction of the stray segment represented by a clitic auxiliary to the preceding syllable as an affix is thus possible. Given other constraints, including Prosodic Faithfulness and the impossibility of syllable-initial affixes, this is indeed the only possible way for these elements to satisfy Full Interpretation. It is also exactly what we expect, given the clear evidence which has already been noted that the reduced auxiliaries depend phonologically on material to their left. But now notice another consequence of this manner of incorporating the clitic auxiliaries into prosodic structure. When the auxiliary would otherwise be PPhrase-initial, adjunction to a preceding syllable effectively shifts it out of the PPhrase to which it would otherwise belong, since the preceding syllable belongs to a distinct PPhrase, and a single syllable cannot be shared by more than one higher-level constituent. This in turn suggests an approach to the ungrammaticality of (3.51a). In this sentence, the final PPhrase which is motivated on syntactic grounds, corresponding to the syntactic phrase [ ’s [e]], would have the structure [ z]. VP

PPh

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Aspects of the Theory of Clitics

But after the restructuring required to incorporate the stray element /z/, this PPhrase would have no phonological content at all. We can thus suggest that what blocks the use of clitic auxiliaries in such contexts is the fact that they would lead to violations of (3.53), a constraint which is arguably a universal well-formedness condition on phonological representations. (3.53)

*[

PPh

∅]: Phonetically empty PPhrases are disallowed.

If (3.53) is to serve as an explanation for the cases in which contracted auxiliaries are not possible, it must be established that the prosodic structure of the relevant sentence types contains a PPhrase whose only phonetic content is a reduced auxiliary, an element that is necessarily aligned out of its original PPhrase as a result of Stray Adjunction. This, in turn, requires a full account of the principles that construct prosodic representation on the basis of syntactic structure in English. I do not attempt a comprehensive description of this sort here, but rely instead on the proposals in Selkirk 1995. To a large extent, prosodic and syntactic structure are similar. In particular, Selkirk argues that the edges of lexical words and of PWords preferably coincide. (3.54)

a. LWdCon: Lexical word boundaries should be PWord boundaries. i. Align(LexWord,L,PWord,L) ii. Align(LexWord,R,PWord,R) b. PWdCon: PWord boundaries should be lexical word boundaries. i. Align(PWord,L,LexWord,L) ii. Align(PWord,R,LexWord,R)

Similarly, the edges of syntactic maximal projections of lexical categories preferably coincide with the edges of PPhrases. (3.55)

LPhCon: Boundaries of lexical maximal projections should be PPhrase boundaries. a. Align(LexMax,L,PPhrase,L) b. Align(LexMax,R,PPhrase,R)

Furthermore, at least the right edge of a PPhrase is preferably aligned with the right edge of a PWord. (3.56)

Align(PPhrase,R,PWord,R): A PPhrase should end with a PWord.

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These constraints do not by themselves determine the way in which nonlexical items, or “function words,” are incorporated into prosodic structure, except through their interaction with the constraints of the prosodic hierarchy more generally and the condition of Full Interpretation. The result is that PPhrase final function words (such as the particle at in What did you look at (last time)) have a PWord built over them, while function words that precede the lexical head of a phrase are incorporated as Free clitics, attached directly to the PPhrase. Selkirk shows that the correct structures follow from the ranking in (3.57) of these constraints. (3.57)

LPhCon, Align(PPhrase,R,PWord,R)  LWdCon, NonRecursive(PWord)  PWdCon, ExhaustivePPh

PPhrases on this analysis are generally built on the basis of the lexical material comprising a syntactic XMax. This PPhrase may also include following function words belonging to the same item, like the at of look at, over which PWords are constructed as just noted. The lexical material is preceded within the PPhrase by Free clitic function words belonging to the same or an including syntactic phrase until the right edge of another PPhrase is reached. Consider now some of the sentence types from which contracted auxiliaries are excluded. (3.58) wh-movement: I wonder where the concert is/*’s [e] on Wednesday. Gapping: Fred is tired of Spinoza, just as Mary is/*’s [e] of Schopenhauer. Adj-preposing: Tired as he is/*’s [e] of his job at the car wash, Fred refuses to look for something better. In each of these sentences, it is clear that a PPhrase boundary occurs just before the auxiliary is. This auxiliary, in turn, is immediately followed by a syntactic gap, and it is exactly the claim of the standard account of contracted auxiliaries that they are excluded when followed by a syntactic gap. But attention to the prosodic structure shows another property of these structures: in each case, a new PPhrase clearly begins in pronunciation immediately after the gap. We could say, then, that the conditions which exclude contracted auxiliaries do not refer directly to the syntactic gap per se, but rather depend on a PPhrase boundary induced by the structure in which it occurs. This, in turn, might be made to follow from a highly ranked constraint such as (3.59).

70 (3.59)

Aspects of the Theory of Clitics Align([e],R,PPhrase,L): Syntactic gaps are followed by a PPhrase boundary.

This constraint encourages the construction of a PPhrase in each of the sentences in (3.58), with its left edge immediately following the (post-auxiliary) gap.15 If the full form of the auxiliary is chosen, it will project a PWord, as with other phrase-final function words. If the contracted form is chosen, however, Stray Adjunction forces it into the preceding PPhrase, producing a violation of (3.53) and rendering the sentence unacceptable. If this were the whole story, the resulting analysis would be a fairly minor variation on the traditional picture, which relates the ill-formedness of a contracted auxiliary to the presence of a following syntactic gap. That is not the case, however. My claim is that the factor which excludes the reduced auxiliaries is not the gap itself, but rather the prosodic structure which it induces. And this is confirmed by other facts. Pullum and Zwicky (1998) note that some constructions containing gaps block the appearance of reduced auxiliaries, despite the fact that the gaps in question do not immediately follow the position of the auxiliary element, as in (3.60). (3.60)

Comparative Subdeletion: Marie’s Pierre is/*’s an [e] engineer.

a

better

scientist

than

Subject-Aux Inversion: Marie’s better known than is/*’s her husband [e]. In these cases, we can note that the material following the auxiliary element is set off by the left edge of a new PPhrase. In the case of Subject-Aux Inversion, this phrasing follows from the general principles we have discussed. It is not obvious that the same is true for Comparative Subdeletion, but regardless, it is clear that this phrasing is associated with the construction. As a consequence, in each of these structures the auxiliary element will find itself alone in a PPhrase beginning at its left edge, such that its phonological attachment to the preceding word will produce a violation of (3.53). Only the selection of the full form of the auxiliary (over which a PWord can be built, given its PPhrase final position) will allow the structure to be well-formed. 15 This is similar in effect to a proposal of Zec and Inkelas (1990) to the effect that a dislocation site in the syntax initiates a new prosodic phrase in the phonology. It should be noted, however, that a number of authors, including Nespor and Vogel (1986) and Truckenbrodt (1999), have argued that phonologically empty syntactic categories are not visible to the processes that construct prosodic structure.

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Indeed, contracted auxiliaries are excluded even in structures with no (relevant) gap at all, but where violations of the condition (3.53) arise. Bresnan (1978) observed that a following parenthetical expression as in (3.61a) blocks contracted auxiliaries. (3.61)

a. John is/*’s, my dear, a bastard. b. John, my dear is/’s a bastard.

Bresnan attributed this to the role of the parenthetical in blocking a supposed cliticization to the right, but in fact the clear phrasal break around parentheticals suffices to explain the phenomenon. Whether the contracted form is also blocked following the parenthetical depends on prosody: if pronounced with a clear break before the following phrase, (3.61b) can only have the full form of the auxiliary, but if no such break is present, many speakers accept the contracted form as well. This makes clear the dependence of the contracted auxiliary on prosodic, rather than syntactic conditions. The same is true of the construction in (3.62) called “Rejoinder Emphasis” by Pullum and Zwicky (1998). (3.62)

Fred is/*’s too going to fix it.

I conclude (with Pullum and Zwicky 1998) that there is no special rule of Auxiliary Reduction in English. Indeed, there is no syntactic condition at all per se that governs the appearance of clitic auxiliaries.16 The role of the syntax in this area is limited to the effect of syntactic constituency in the construction of prosodic structure. All we need to say about the auxiliaries is that each of these have two forms, either of which can in principle be chosen freely. If the full form is chosen, it will behave either as a final or a non-final function word, depending on its prosodic position. If the reduced (non-syllabic) form is chosen, it will necessarily undergo reattachment as an affix to a preceding syllable, resulting in a violation of (3.53) where this results in a phonetically empty PPhrase. The reduced forms of English auxiliaries are thus simple or phonological clitics in these sense of this book. 16 Kaisse (1985) argues for additional conditions on the relation between the auxiliary and preceding material, specifically the “Government Condition” which stipulates that auxiliaries may cliticize only onto a constituent that they govern. This would block sentences such as Speaking tonight’s our star reporter to which Kaisse assigns a star, but which I and nearly all speakers with whom I have discussed the matter find perfectly acceptable. If some such condition nevertheless exists, I would interpret it as governing the formation under appropriate syntactic circumstances of prosodic constituents at higher levels, such as the IntPhrase, whose presence blocks the incorporation via Stray Adjunction of the clitic auxiliary into the preceding PPhrase, resulting in its stranding in a prosodically ill-formed position.

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Let us now return to the observation that children acquire the use of the contracted auxiliary forms in English rapidly and essentially without error. On the traditional account, this is quite mysterious. If “Auxiliary Reduction” is a process specific to English, depending on a comprehensive analysis of rather subtle syntactic factors, including as a central component the role of syntactic elements which are not manifested overtly in sentence form, it is hard to see how the learner could arrive at the correct analysis as directly as seems to be the case. My claim is that the phonology of these clitics depends only indirectly on syntactic form, and only to the extent this is a significant determinant of prosodic form. Syntactic phrasing is not always faithfully reflected in phonological phrasing, but neither is the relation between the two arbitrary and unconstrained. Children are sensitive at a very early age (around eight to ten months)17 to the phonological organization of utterances into phrases, and there is no doubt that they use this structure as a crucial key to discovering the syntactic organization of sentences and phrases. In order to do this, they must assume that syntactic phrases correspond largely to phonological ones. It seems clear that the prosodic structure is available to the learner before the syntactic form. On the prosodic analysis, there is no mystery to the rapidity with which use of the clitic auxiliaries is acquired. All the child needs to learn is the fact that certain function words have optional variants which are prosodically deficient (i.e., phonological clitics). This information is directly available in surface forms, since children hear both The tiger is in that cage and The tiger’s in that cage and have no reason not to treat them as optional variants. They must learn the phonology of forms such as the plural of nouns, the possessive, and the third-person singular present of verbs, and that knowledge provides them with the phonological apparatus to account for the phonetic forms of the clitic auxiliaries. They must also gain access to the prosodic structures within which these regularities play out, but as noted above, this information is probably in place before a complete syntactic interpretation is arrived at. No language-specific conditions, syntactic or otherwise, govern the contracted auxiliaries per se, once it is determined that they are phonological clitics. An understanding of the significance of prosodic structure can probably lead to the resolution of another chronic puzzle in English, the analysis of contracted forms such as wanna, gonna, hafta, and a few others. These represent combinations of want, going, have, etc., with the to of a following infinitive. 17

See de Boysson-Bardies (1999) for a review of the literature establishing this.

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It is widely assumed that the presence of a syntactic gap intervening between the base word and to is responsible for blocking the “Contraction” in cases such as those illustrated in (3.63). (3.63)

a. New Haven is the place I want to/wanna go next. b. Fred is the guy I want [e] to/*wanna go next. c. Community college is the only school he’s going to/gonna get into. d. New Haven is the next place he’s going [e] to/*gonna find out whether he likes the east coast. e. This is the money I have to/hafta give to my sister. f. This is all the money I have [e] to/*hafta get through the week.

The apparent role of a gap in preventing contraction has caused numerous authors to attempt to assimilate this phenomenon in some way to that of the contracted auxiliaries. Arguably, however, it is not the presence of a gap per se that blocks the use of wanna, gonna, hafta in these examples, but rather a fact about prosodic structure. Notice that in pronunciation, there is a clear PPhrase boundary preceding the to in each of the sentences where the contracted forms are impossible. No such boundary is necessary, however, in the cases where contracted forms can be used. Since this is not a book about the syntax of complementation, I will not propose explicit structures from which this intonational difference should be derived, but there is little doubt that structural distinctions are present to which it can be attributed. Suppose, therefore, that rather than being the result of a “Contraction” process, forms like wanna, etc. are lexicalized portmanteaux—in this respect, comparable to French au (=a+le) and du (=de+le). Each of the English contracted forms consists of two syllables, forming a trochaic foot. If they have this prosodic structure already at the point where they are inserted, it is clear why their use will be blocked when a PPhrase boundary should intervene between the syntactic positions of want, going, have, etc., and that of to. The prosodic hierarchy prevents a single foot from belonging simultaneously to two distinct constituents at a higher level, such as the PPhrase. As in the case of the reduced auxiliaries, no reference to a condition on syntactic structure is necessary here at all, but only an appreciation of the way such structure may influence the formation of prosodic representations. Prosodic structure, then, plays an important part in governing the wellformedness of sentences. For present purposes, the most significant aspect of this component of linguistic form is the fact that phonological (or “simple”) clitics, material without the prosodic structure of normal lexical items, must

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be integrated into the prosodic hierarchy through Stray Adjunction and the phonological adjustments that may arise as a consequence. The study of these effects across a variety of languages forms the content of one of the two distinct dimensions of “clitic” phenomena to which this book is devoted.

4 Special Clitics and their Grammar Let us return to Zwicky’s proposed class of Special clitics as introduced in section 2.1. These were defined as unaccented bound forms that are variants of free forms (similar in sound and meaning) and that display “special” syntax. I will focus in this chapter on just what this last point might mean. What, exactly, is special about the distribution of special clitics? The “special” syntax of a clitic might simply be “different” syntax from the corresponding free form, as in the French sentences in (4.1). Assuming the underlined expressions in these sentences are intended to refer to the same individual, when that reference is made by a full DP, this phrase follows the finite verb, while the corresponding argument appears pre-verbally when it is a clitic pronoun. (4.1) a. Je vois l’homme dont je t’ai parlé I see the man of whom I to you have spoken I see the man I told you about vois b. Je le I him see I see him Alternatively, it might be something more unusual such as obligatory appearance in second position, as in the Ngiyambaa examples in (4.2). (4.2) a. Nunhi=lu=na Nadhi gave- 3erg- 3abs me- obl He gave it to me Na:nhi Nadhu b. Ninu: I- nom you- obl saw I saw you In Ngiyambaa (Donaldson 1980), bound pronouns are all located together in a fixed sequence in second position within the clause, although the order of other words in the clause (including non-bound pronouns) is free. The placement of the pronouns in (4.2a) is thus the only one available, while their

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order relative to each other and to the verb in (4.2b) is only one of several possibilities. “Second position” is a notion that we will explore later in much more detail in this book. Significantly, it may not be available at all to the syntax to the extent the relevant sense of “second” is based on phonological constituents (such as PWords) rather than syntactic phrases.

4.1 Phenomenology A useful initial step toward understanding the morphosyntactic dimension of clitic structure would be a survey of the phenomena, in the form of a catalog of the varieties of special distribution which clitics may show. After some initial clarification of terminology, I turn to such a survey, as a prelude to the question of where to locate the description of special clitics within a grammar. Special Clitics as a Linguistic Category Recalling the discussion in Chapter 2, there are some components which should probably be factored out of Zwicky’s definition. For one thing, to the extent special clitics are unaccented, this can be treated as following from the fact that they may be phonological clitics as well, independently of their distinctive distribution. I propose, then, that rather than treating simple clitics and special clitics as two distinct and non-overlapping categories, we regard the phonological and the morphosyntactic dimensions of clitic behavior as separable. In fact, most special clitics are also phonological clitics, but the two properties are logically quite distinct and neither necessarily implies the other. Furthermore, not all special clitics are unaccented, as we have seen. For instance, in Lucanian (as discussed in section 3.2), stress may appear on a pronominal special clitic because in this language stress is always penultimate within the PWord, and clitic pronominals are incorporated into this constituent—where they may receive stress. It is by no means obvious that all special clitics are also phonological clitics, though. Recall that the basis of phonological clitic behavior is prosodic deficiency (failure to constitute a PWord, in particular). Where a clitic consists of isolated segments, or a single light syllable (in a language whose minimal PWord consists of two syllables or two moras), such a diagnosis is obvious. In some instances, though, a special clitic may contain enough material to constitute a foot, and as such, may display stress in all or most of its occurrences. Examples of this type include Tagalog tayo ‘we (dual)’ (about which I will have more to say in Chapter 6) and Italian loro. Even in such a case, however, it is still difficult to say with certainty that the element under investigation does or does not constitute a PWord. For instance, in Seediq (an Austronesian language of Taiwan; cf. Holmer 1996), stress is

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uniformly penultimate. Members of a set of clitic pronouns occur in second position within the clause, as illustrated by saku ‘2sg.sbj;1sg.obj’ in (4.3). (4.3) Wada =saku ini qtayi pret 2sg→1sg neg see You didn’t see me Some of these clitics, like saku, are bisyllabic; others include sami ‘1pl.excl.sbj’; simu ‘2pl.sbj’; misu ‘1sg.sbj; 2sg.obj’, etc. These bisyllabic units get stressed quite regularly. Furthermore, according to Holmer, the word preceding one of them undergoes ‘end of word’ phonology. This certainly suggests that the clitic constitutes a new word, but in fact it is consistent either with a two-word PPhrase (e.g., [ [ wada][ saku]]) or with a recursive PPh

PWd

PWd

PWord structure (e.g., [ [ wada]saku]). To distinguish between these PWd PWd possibilities (and thus to establish the prosodic status of the clitic), we need evidence from distinctive sandhi at the boundary between two PWords. An example of the appropriate sort is apparently furnished by Warlpiri. In this language, as is well known, auxiliary elements and pronominal clitics cluster together in second position within the clause. In addition to the auxiliary bases (ka and lpa as well as a hypothetical phonologically null base), complementizers can also appear in this position. Given the contrast between the generally free word order of Warlpiri sentences and the rigidity of ordering of clitics, auxiliaries and complementizers, all of these elements are undoubtedly to be analyzed as special clitics. While the auxiliary bases are monosyllabic, and thus prosodically deficient with respect to the minimally bisyllabic Warlpiri PWord, the complementizers (with the exception of yi ‘for, since’) are bisyllabic, and thus at least candidates for independent PWord status. This status is supported by a fact noted by Legate (forthcoming): vowel harmony, a PWord-internal process assimilating the backness of high vowels in successive syllables, does not apply between the sentence-initial stem and a complementizer. An example is given in (4.4), where the vowels that are underlined should harmonize in backness if they were part of the same PWord. kuja=lpa=lu liwanja-paju-rnu, . . . (4.4) Nganayi whatchamacallit decl.comp-pst.imperf-3pl.sbj fish- call- pst That thing they called fish . . . Further analysis of the precise interaction between prosodic structure and vowel harmony in Warlpiri is still necessary before such examples can be securely interpreted as instances of prosodically autonomous special clitics. I will

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assume, though, that it is possible for a special clitic to constitute a PWord in its own right, and thus that special clitics are not necessarily phonological clitics as well. Another thing to be factored out is the requirement that special clitics be “variants of free forms.” Recall that Zwicky was led to posit a class of “bound words” which are just like special clitics, except that they are not variants of any free form. That suggests that a clitic may or may not alternate with a free form, but this is a lexical fact about particular elements rather than a defining property of a linguistically significant class of items. In French, for instance, we have (clitic or ‘conjunct’) me, te, etc. but nonclitic (or ‘disjunct’) moi, toi. The latter appear in ordinary DP positions; the former as clitics attached to the finite verb of the clause. On Zwicky’s definition, it is the existence of the disjunct pronouns that authorizes us to call the conjunct forms special clitics, since we can treat the latter as weak variants of the former. I suggest, though, that it is a mistake to treat corresponding members of these two sets as alternate forms of the same lexical item. It is true that they are generally in complementary distribution, but this is due to the general impossibility in French of clitics that “double” or have the same reference as a full DP expression.1 This is true not only for disjunct pronouns, but for any other DP as well, as illustrated in (4.5).2 (4.5)

a. J’ai vu toi qui sortait de la chambre ‘I saw you coming out of the room’ b. *Je t’ai vu toi c. *Je le vois le garçon d. *Je le lui donne le livre au garçon

The conjunct and disjunct forms, that is, are two separate lexical items that happen to have the same reference, rather than one single item. Their mutual exclusivity within a single sentence results from the broader regularity that, for reasons to be explored later in connection with clitic doubling more generally, French pronominal clitics are in complementary distribution with full DPs.

1 Some forms of colloquial French are much freer than the standard language in allowing clitic pronouns to double full DP expressions, including disjunct pronouns. This does not affect the point being made here. 2 If the full DPs in these examples are set off intonationally, as right-dislocated elements, they are perfectly compatible with a coreferring clitic, but this is not directly relevant to the impossibility of clitic doubling within the clause in (standard) French.

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A more complete account of this (which I will offer in Chapter 8) is based on principles of anaphora, not syntactic movement, but need not occupy us at this point. A Typology of Special Clitics What remains of Zwicky’s defining properties of special clitics, then, is their characteristic special positioning. A special clitic is thus a “little word” whose syntax is not assimilable to that of full words that might seem to be syntactically parallel. To develop a theory of special clitics, we need to survey the range of such “special syntax” that we might find. In work that has served as the classic foundation for all theories of special clitics since Zwicky’s original proposals, Klavans (1982, 1985) provides us with a descriptive typology. She first notes that any given clitic can be seen as located with respect to some domain with which it is (syntactically and semantically) associated. In practice, this yields three general sorts of clitic. First, there are sentence clitics, located with respect to an entire clause. This includes auxiliary elements, many sorts of pronominals, particles marking discourse or illocutionary force, and many other sorts of clitics taking scope over the whole sentence. A second type is specifically associated with nominal expressions (NP/DP clitics such as case markers, determiners, or possessives as in some Balkan and Uralic languages). Finally, we have clitics which can be associated with phrases of any type, as markers of emphasis, constituent negation, interrogation, or other similar operators. The syntax of any particular special clitic is thus characterized in part by the domain within which it is located (CP/IP, DP/NP, XP). Relative to its domain, Klavans proposed two further parameters that determine where the clitic is located. The first of these, which I will call Anchoring instead of Klavans’s term Dominance, characterizes a clitic as oriented with respect either to the first or to the last element within the domain. The second positional parameter then specifies whether the clitic is placed before or after the anchoring element. These parameters accommodate four kinds of clitics in terms of their position within a domain: initial and second position (before/after the first element); pre-final and final position (before/after the last element). Three of these types are abundantly attested in natural languages: initial clitics, such as the Kw akw ’ala determiners we saw in Chapter 2, second-position clitics which will be discussed in much more detail below, and final-position clitics such as the English possessive marker ’s. From considerations of symmetry within the system, we would also expect pre-final or penultimate position clitics, but in fact it is hard to find any real examples of this type. Klavans proposes (Kugu) Nganhcara (Smith and

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Johnson 2000) pronominals as a possible instance, but there are two problems with that analysis. First, in some sentences, the clitics in question are actually final, rather than pre-final. Secondly, in those sentences with pre-final clitics, they always immediately precede the verb (which is itself in final position). It is therefore difficult to say that the positional regularity here is “before the last element of the clause” rather than “before the verb.” It is not unreasonable to ask, in fact, whether there are any genuine examples of specifically pre-final clitics, a question which I will note again below. Are these in fact the only possibilities for clitic positioning? Sometimes it appears that rather than being anchored to the first or last element within their domain, clitics are anchored by the head element within that domain. Romance pronominals, for example, are clearly anchored by the finite verb of their clause (if there is one; alternatively, by the infinitive or other main verb in some types of non-finite clauses). The anchoring verb is clearly the head of its VP (and when bearing Tense, Agreement, etc., of IP as well). For a nonpronoun example, Finnish –kin ‘also’ (cf. Nevis 1986) is a sentential clitic that attaches to the right of the first tensed verb of the clause (as head of IP). (4.6) Kalle on=kin ostanut auton Karl is- also bought car Karl also bought a car Kaisse (1985), Nevis (1986), Zwicky (1987), and Anderson (1992), among others, have thus suggested the availability of a third value for the Anchoring parameter, one which would allow for orientation with respect to the head of the relevant phrasal domain. There is another way to look at these clitics, however. Instead of seeing them as placed within the phrasal domain, and anchored by its head, we could regard them as placed within a smaller domain: that of the head constituent itself (V or perhaps I).3 On this picture, the Domain parameter can be set to any category that is either a maximal phrasal projection or a lexical category which projects such a phrase. There would then be no need to allow a third value for the Anchoring parameter. In some languages, multiple possibilities for the positioning of a given clitic may be instantiated. In most of the Romance languages, for example, pronominal clitics generally appear initially within the domain of the finite verb, but under some circumstances (with non-finite verbs, imperatives, or 3 Note that the syntactic domain V as head of VP is not the same as the lexical item (a verb) which appears within that domain. Saying that a clitic appears initial or final within the domain of V is thus not to be confused with treating it as an inflectional prefix or suffix on the verb. This difference will be significant in some instances to be discussed later.

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in Portuguese, sometimes with finite verbs) they may instead appear finally within this verbal domain. Similar facts obtain in some South Slavic languages. To the extent the conditions for initial versus final appearance can be formulated exactly, this complication does not impugn the overall typology of clitic positioning, however. With respect to second-position clitics, an important point that will occupy us at some length below is the fact that “second position” can have more than one meaning. It often means “following the first syntactic daughter of the constituent defining the domain,” but in some languages it may instead mean “following the first PWord, PPhrase, etc. within the phonological realization of the domain.” The best-known example of this type is the clitic system of some forms of Serbo-Croatian, as described by Browne (1974), which will be the subject of closer attention in Chapter 5. This possibility corresponds to the fact that (at least in descriptive terms) the anchoring element may be interpreted either as a syntactic or as a prosodic object. All of the possible placements for clitics considered so far assume that clitics are placed at the periphery of some anchoring element. Some examples have been proposed, however, in which so called “endoclitics” (in the terminology of Zwicky 1977) appear internal to a word. Putative examples include Pashto (Tegey 1977; van der Leeuw 1995a; Roberts 1997) á-de-xist ‘you were buying it’; Udi (Harris 2002) a-ne-q’-sa ‘she takes’ (root /aq’/); and Portuguese dar-no-lo-á ‘he will give it to us’. These cases will be examined more closely in Chapter 6, and I will ignore the issues they might pose for the moment. A final parameter of individual clitics within Klavans’s theory is the direction of their phonological attachment (proclitic or enclitic). One might expect a clitic to take as its host the element with respect to which it is anchored, or perhaps the element with which it is most closely associated syntactically, but in fact clitics may attach phonologically to an element which does not even form a part of the syntactic domain in which the clitic is positioned. We have already seen this with respect to Kw akw ’ala determiners and pronouns (a case also cited by Klavans). A closely similar example is provided by Yagua (Payne and Payne 1990), as in (4.7). In this language, Object DPs are immediately preceded by a coreferring clitic pronominal which attaches to the word that precedes it, regardless of the syntactic relation (if any) which that word may bear to the object. e

(4.7) sa- púúchiy Pauro rooriy- v11mu=níí Anita 3sg.sbj- lead/carry Paul house- inside- 3sg.obj Anita Paul leads/carries Anita inside a/the house Another example is provided by Northern Vogul, as in (4.8) from Nevis (1990).

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´ Xani (4.8) Xum jot=ke åleGe˙ m naurem man with- if I live child clings If I live with a man, the child belongs to me Here the clitic ke ‘if ’ is located immediately before the verb, but attaches to its left. Similarly, in Kugu Nganhcara (Smith and Johnson 2000), pronominal clitics precede the verb but attach to the preceding word, as in (4.9). (4.9) ngaya ku’an hingkurum ka’im=ngkurum kala- ng 1sg.nom dog 2sg.abl neg- 2sg.abl take- 1sg I didn’t take your dog These and a number of other examples of the same sort are discussed and analyzed by Cysouw (forthcoming). According to Klavans, they motivate an additional parameter of individual clitics, their phonological liaison. In section 3.3 above, however, I argued that the direction of phonological attachment is not a lexical property of individual clitics, but rather follows from the way(s) in which the principles of Stray Adjunction operate in a language with respect to its prosodic structure. I will therefore assume that we can dispense with any such parameter as an item-specific property within the typology of special clitics. In summary, an exhaustive typology of special clitic positions is given by the parameters in (4.10). (4.10) A clitic is located a. within the Domain of some syntactic constituent (X0 or Xmax for some value of X); b. by reference to the first versus last daughter constituent of that domain (interpreted either syntactically or prosodically); and c. preceding or following this anchor point.

4.2 Special Clitics as the Morphology of Phrases The typology of special clitics that I have just presented seems to be an adequate taxonomy of what we find in the languages of the world, but it does not go very far beyond simple observation. That is, it does not really tell us how special clitics are to be accounted for in an explicit grammar. It does not even tell us directly where to look for such an account: in the syntax (as syntacticians assume virtually without discussion), in the phonology (where we have already

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found all that is apparently necessary to describe simple clitics), or perhaps somewhere else. Certainly the most popular picture is the syntactic one, according to which special clitics are introduced into sentences in the same way as other (lexical) items, and then displaced from where we might expect to find syntactically corresponding words to their surface position. On that view, the parameters of the preceding section become parameters that characterize a set of syntactic rules. A priori, though, that is not a very attractive position. For one thing, as I have already noted and will discuss below in more detail, second-position clitics may come literally after the first word in some languages; and this (phonological) notion is not in general available to the syntax (which deals in phrasal constituents). For another, this kind of “syntax” is quite incompatible with the way syntactic movement is otherwise characterized. The notion of a set of special syntactic rules of the sort implied by this typology is clearly a relic of the more general conception of syntax as grounded in a collection of construction-specific rules (“Passive,” “Dative Movement,” “Subject-to-Object Raising,” etc.). Most modern theories of syntax4 deplore such rules and attempt to derive the properties of individual constructions from more general properties of structure and displacement operations. This might, of course, turn out to be impossible, but our first impression surely ought to be that if a syntactic theory of special clitics must take this form, we should consider the possibility that some other part of the grammar might be better suited to the purpose. The alternative which I will pursue in this book is the proposal that clitics are not syntactic objects at all, but morphological ones: overt morphological markers of the morphosyntactic properties of phrases. Clitics on this view are phrasal affixes. Later chapters will be devoted to filling out and justifying this view, but to establish its a priori attractiveness, let us compare the typology of special clitics developed above with the typology of morphological markers realizing the morphosyntactic properties of words: primarily (but not exclusively) the typology of affixes. Most affixes are either prefixes or suffixes of course, but there are also infixes. Examination of these (Moravcsik 1977; Anderson 1992) reveals that we 4 There are exceptions, of course, of which the most obvious is the framework of “Construction Grammar” (Goldberg 1995). Various other syntactic theories also admit at least a limited amount of parochial, construction-specific structure in syntax, without going so far as to suggest that such formations constitute the core of grammatical knowledge. I take it for granted that anything that can be reduced to general principles ought to be, and that rules which directly stipulate the properties of a construction are an admission of failure in this endeavor—perhaps necessary, but surely not desirable.

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find morphological markers infixed not just anywhere in a word, but only in a restricted range of positions. Summarizing a number of different surveys, we can say that infixes either follow the first element of some prosodic type (segment, syllable, etc.) within the word whose properties they mark, or else they precede the last element of such a type in the word. This of course looks rather like what we saw with special clitics, and essentially the same set of parameters can characterize both types of element. Prefixes go before the first element, suffixes after the last, and the two sorts of infix are located after the first or before the last. Among affixes, there is an analog to the issue of the domain within which clitics are placed. Recall that some special clitics are located within the domain of the head of a phrase (e.g., Romance conjunct pronominals). The same can also be true for affixes. It is suggested in Anderson (1992) that words sometimes have internal structure, as with Icelandic [[kalla]st] ‘to be called s.t.’ or Georgian [mo[k’lav]] ‘(will) kill’. In such a case the affix may be located as a prefix (or suffix) to the internal head of the word, as in [[köll- um]st] ‘we are called s.t.’ or [mo[v- k’lav]] ‘I will kill (him/her/them)’. Pursuing the parallel between special clitics and word-level morphology, we can note that among the various types of infix, those located in pre-final position are comparatively quite rare. In this they are rather like penultimate clitics, which may exist, but as a distinctly unusual type. This similarity is of course only a tendency (assuming penultimate clitics exist at all), but it is interesting to note that it takes the same form in both areas of grammar. A striking similarity between the two classes of phenomena is in the matter of ordering. Within a word, the order of morphological markers is virtually always strictly determined and invariable, holding meaning constant. Of course, the passive of a causative will typically differ in the order of markers from the causative of a passive: this is the basis of the “Mirror Principle” proposed by Baker (1985). But for given content, no known language allows the order of affixes to vary freely. In contrast, practically all languages allow for some freedom in the ordering of constituents or even individual words while preserving semantic content. When we look at clitics, we find that their order is largely fixed, like that of morphological affixes, and essentially never free, like that of syntactic units. The contrast can be stark within an individual language. In Warlpiri, for example, word order is extremely free, but the one constant is the fact that a set of special clitics (including auxiliary elements and pronominals) must come in second position, and must conform to a strict internal template. In this respect, special clitics clearly behave much more like morphology than like syntax.

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There are cases in which the same clitic may appear in different positions with respect to its anchor without affecting the semantics. A well-known case of this sort is furnished by (European) Portuguese, as illustrated in (4.11) from Barbosa (1996). (4.11)

a. Só o Pedro o viu only art Pedro him= saw Only Pedro saw him b. *Só o Pedro viu-o c. Viu- o só o Pedro saw=him only art Pedro Only Pedro saw him d. *O viu só o Pedro

Other alternations in order have already been mentioned above in other Romance and Balkan languages, where clitics often precede the finite verb but follow non-finite and imperative forms. The alternation in position which we find in these cases is nothing like free word order or other “Scrambling” phenomena, however. Rather, the order which is strictly required under one set of circumstances is replaced by another under a complementary set of conditions. In the Portuguese case, pronominals appear in enclitic position when the finite verb is initial within its clause (or within a constituent of some other specific type: see Barbosa 1996; Galves and Sandalo 2004; and section 6.2 below for discussion). Otherwise, the pronominals appear proclitic to the finite verb. No optionality is involved, as the ungrammatical forms in (4.11) show. Parallel to these cases are examples in word-level morphology where the same affix may show up either as a prefix or as a suffix, depending on specific factors. The most widely cited example of this is from Afar (Fulmer 1990), where several affixes show up as suffixes when the verb stem begins with a consonant or the low vowel [A], but as prefixes when the verb stem begins with a non-low vowel. Other movable affixes are described by Nevis and Joseph (1992), who note several cases in a footnote, and by Noyer (1994). What is notable is that in each case, the position of the affix is not at all free. Rather, it depends on factors such as the shape of the stem to which it attaches, or on some other morphological category which is copresent. For instance, in Huave as described by Noyer (1994), a theme vowel appears as a suffix to the stem in detransitivized forms but otherwise as a prefix. Both clitics and word-internal affixes only display alternations in order under clearly specifiable conditions,

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as opposed to the much greater freedom of word (or constituent) order found in many languages. I have suggested that post-initial infixes are analogous to second-position clitics, both occurring after the first element of some specified type within the domain whose properties they specify. In general, the anchoring element for word-internal infixes is prosodically defined: a consonant, syllable nucleus, syllable, foot, etc. In at least one case, however the parallel with clitics is even more striking. Nevis and Joseph (1992) argue that a reflexive/passive affix in Balto-Slavic (Lithuanian –s(i)) occurs precisely in a word-internal second position, as illustrated in (4.12). (4.12) No prefix: m¯atymasi-s ‘seeing each other’; kalbúo-si ‘I converse’ One prefix: pa-si-m¯atymas ‘a date, meeting’; be-si-kalbant ‘while conversing’ Two prefixes: su-si-pa-žìnti ‘to become acquainted with’; pri-sipa-žìnti ‘to confess, avow’ Nevis and Joseph call –s(i) a “Wackernagel affix,” and establish that it is part of the same PWord with the stem and other affixes. I suggest that this is indeed a case of “suffix to the first element in the word.” Assuming that the prefixes after which –s(i) appears are structure-building, like the Georgian and Icelandic affixes discussed above, the element that counts as “first” is a structural one. This account is consistent with dialectal variation which they mention in whether the reflexive marker, when it comes after the unprefixed stem, comes before or after inflectional suffixes. The similarity between this affix and second-position clitics is thus unusually striking. Just as not all morphological markers are concatenative affixes, there are also clitics that are processual (or “non-concatenative”). I will discuss below the analysis of the “definitive accent” in some Polynesian languages. In Anderson 1992, I also cited in this connection the marking of (some) accusative objects in Welsh by soft mutation (a non-concatenative morphological process) at the left edge of the nominal phrase. Another interesting example is furnished by some languages of the Algonquian family. Algonquian languages such as Potawatomi display person-marking prefixes at the left edge of the verbal phrase. Though these have often been regarded as inflection markers on the verb (and were so treated in Anderson 1992), Hockett (1948) showed that they should actually be analyzed as phraseinitial clitics, a view also adopted by Halle and Marantz (1993). In their positioning, the Potawatomi personal pronoun clitics are interestingly similar to another element in Algonquian morphosyntax which appears in several

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languages of the family: a replacive vowel change affecting the leftmost vowel in the same verbal projection as that to which the personal proclitics are attached. This “initial change” (to adopt the terminology of Bloomfield 1946 and elsewhere) functions as a sort of complementizer in marking certain subordinate constructions, as in (4.13). Vowels affected by initial change (or related to others that are) are underlined. (4.13)

Potawatomi: a. Pe ki mpot prt past died He died mpot b. ka past (< ki) died the one who died Menomini:

a. ne=pa:pam- nato:nE:hok me=going about- he seeks me He goes about seeking me b. (emeq) pE:pam- esiat (yonder) going about- he goes It is over yonder that he goes about

Fox:

kano:n- ehka a. e:shki first (