Second position clitics
Tagalog has a number of particles which must occur as the second element of their immediate clause. These particles include nominative and genitive pronouns, question markers, aspectual particles, various markers of speaker’s attitude, evidentials, etc. Normal word order in Tagalog is verb initial, so these clitics normally occur immediately after the verb, as in (11). When a negative or other adverbial element appears in pre-verbal position, as in (12), the clitics also precede the verb. And in sentences which contain two clauses, the clitic elements of each clause occur in second position within that clause (12–13).
The reason these elements are classified as special clitics is that their position is not determined by normal syntactic rules. For example, regular (non-pronominal) NPs do not occur before the verb even when a pre-verbal negative marker or adverb is present. Compare the position of the nominative NP si Linda in (14a) with the corresponding pronoun siya in (14b).
“Second position” in Tagalog means immediately after the first constituent of the clause. That constituent may be a single word, as in (11–14), or it may be an entire phrase, as in (15a, b). In other languages, however, second-position elements may occur after the first word of the phrase, clause, or sentence that contains them.
Yes–No questions in Russian may be formed by the use of the enclitic particle =li, which attaches to the first word of the sentence as illustrated in (16). In a sense, the interrogative marker in Russian is a second-position clitic. However, the position of the clitic depends on phonological constituent boundaries as well as syntactic structure.
King (1995) states that the interrogative particle attaches as an enclitic to the first PHONOLOGICAL WORD of the focused constituent. Verbs always constitute a single phonological word, but a phrasal constituent (such as an NP) may contain more than one phonological word. When a phrasal constituent containing more than one phonological word is focused, the clitic will occur inside the boundaries of the constituent which it marks, as in (17a, b). In(17b), the preposition na is not a phonological word; so, the clitic attaches to the string na etom ‘at this,’ which is a single phonological word even though it is not a syntactic constituent.
