Clitics
We identified two basic classes of morphemes, free vs. bound. We said that free morphemes are those which can occur as independent words, while bound morphemes are those which cannot occur by themselves as complete words. An important difference between affixes and roots is that affixes are always bound, while roots may be (and in English usually are) free.
We will discuss forms which are difficult to classify as either free or bound, forms that in some ways seem like independent words but in other ways seem more like affixes. Ambiguous elements of this type are called CLITICS.
To begin with a specific example, let us look at verbal inflection in Amele, a Papuan language of New Guinea. Verbs in Amele are marked for subject agreement, object agreement (optional), tense, mood, and certain other categories. In most sentences, these markers appear as suffixes on the verb, as in (1).
However, in certain contexts these “suffixes” may be separated from the verb and occur as free forms; that is, they can be pronounced as independent words. Some examples are given in (2–4).
Roberts (1996) demonstrates that the tense and agreement markers are not affixes (in the usual sense) but auxiliaries which occur in clause-final position.2 When these auxiliaries occur next to the verb stem, as in (1), (2a), (3a), and (4a), they are “phonologically bound” to the verb, i.e. pronounced as part of the same PHONOLOGICAL WORD. This is the most common pattern. However, in a number of contexts they may also stand alone as separate phonological words, as illustrated in (2b), (3b), and (4b).
Notice that the syntactic position of the Amele auxiliaries is the same in both cases. The attachment of the auxiliaries to the verb stem in the (a) examples appears to be purely phonological. The rules of syntax which determine the order of elements in the clause must treat these auxiliaries as independent words, whether they are finally pronounced that way or not. Thus, the bound forms of the auxiliaries in (1), (2a), (3a), and (4a) match very well a standard definition of a CLITIC: an element which is “syntactically free but phonologically bound.”
The phrase “syntactically free” means that the rules of syntax treat the clitic as an independent word. The phrase “phonologically bound” means that the clitic is pronounced as if it were affixed to an adjacent word. (This word is called the clitic’s HOST.) So, we need to be able to make a distinction between phonological words and syntactic words; a clitic and its host constitute a single phonological word but two separate syntactic words.
1. As noted below, the acute accents in (2) represent primary stress.
2. These auxiliary elements are followed only by sentence-final elements such as question particles, sentence-level conjunctions, complementizers, etc.
