Clitic is an uncomfortably broad and ill-defined term, and the extended Wikipedia definition does it at least partial justice. It's a cover term for all those things in languages that don't behave unexceptionably like words and also don't behave unexceptionably as affixes. That tells us what they aren't. Describing what they are has occupied a number of very good linguists for significant parts of their careers. Just look at Arnold Zwicky's publications on clitics, and he's probably the best of those who have looked at the problem. We can, however, say that certain clitics in certain languages behave in certain ways. Unstressed pronouns in Romance languages tend to behave quite a bit alike, as do articles and auxiliaries in Germanic languages. But one definition that is necessary and sufficient for clitics around the world? Next some one will be asking for a unified field theory.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: July 23, 2008 5:18 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Clitics (Speaking of Elementary Concepts)
Eleanor,
That Wikipedia entry seems accurate, except it only mentions the possessive as a clitic. Herb was suggesting that the articles might be considered clitics since they attach to the following word, yet belong syntactically to the noun phrase. (Not as obvious since they come in front.) The simple examples place them next to a noun, but adjectives may intervene and allow them to undergo morphophonemic alteration. My speculation was with “to” as an infinitive marker, where it may have adverbs intervene. In this case there is no morphophonemic alteration to compare to, so perhaps the motivation for analyzing it as a clitic goes away. This was really my question. The stressed examples of “to” have it as an adverb, “he ran to and fro” or “she finally came to.” The close idiomatic connection to the verb seems to make this use a verbal particle. These are stressed over and against the unstressed preposition, “ran to the store,” “came to consciousness.” So these are maybe two (or three) words. In the case of the adverb “the” and the article “the,” the two lack stress and the stressed version is called “nonce.” This was my second question.
Bruce
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eleanor Bloom
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 2:00 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Clitics (Speaking of Elementary Concepts)
Bruce,
I am wondering why one would want to associate an infinitive marker, which creates a phrase when put before a verb, with prefixes? What would be the purpose? Or is it just to explore the functionality of the marker (“act like a prefix”)? The stress “level” seems to remain unchanged regardless of splitting—the stress goes to the word doing the splitting (e.g. We are now going to definitely stop.)
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Carol Morrison
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 12:36 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Clitics (Speaking of Elementary Concepts)
What is a "clitic"? (I'm almost afraid to ask because it sounds obscene). I really do want to know what it is though, and it's not in any of my grammar handbooks.
Thank you.
Carol
--- On Wed, 7/23/08, Bruce Despain <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Bruce Despain <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Clitics (Speaking of Elementary Concepts)
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Wednesday, July 23, 2008, 2:16 PM
Let me add a question about "to" as an infinitive marker. In that
position it seems to act like a prefix as it attaches to the verb and seems
never to be stressed -- just like a clitic. Yet, if we split the infinitive,
the possibility of stress looms larger. Maybe this is part of the prohibition
against splitting the infinitive. It starts to look more like that
"abso-blooming-lutely" split. Comments?
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 9:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Speaking of Elementary Concepts
Herb,
A great explanation! However, it seems to me (maybe just my dialect) that
making it a nonce alternation can be misleading, especially if you mean thereby
that it is non-systematic. If you mean that we use this pronunciation when we
cite the word as such, ok. I think rather that we have for "the" the
specific morphophonemic rule /i/ -> @ / _C that would then correspond with
the rule for /i/ in unstressed position. The word in the phrase "the more
the merrier" is syntactically an adverb and still unstressed, so the
instrumental seems to be a natural explanation.
My original question concerned the status of articles as clitics in the classic
sense. I suppose that it is their non-stressed pronunciation in normal use
(non-nonce?) that is the pivotal criterion. This seems to open up a lot of
possibilities for other words having "clitic" uses in English.
Wouldn't we be inclined to make prepositions when attached to noun phrases
into clitics? These, of course, have distinctive uses as verbal particles and
adverbs, where they would not be clitics.
Bruce
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2008 7:22 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Speaking of Elementary Concepts
Bruce,
The i/@ alternation with "the" is a peculiar one. It's also a
nonce alternation, I think, so we don't have a general @ --> i / __V.
Once explanation I've read is that this is a reflex of the old instrumental
case form "thy," which also survives in the formulaic construction
"the more the merrier." It's a plausible claim, but there's
just no strong evidence to support it. English allows only three vowels in
final unstressed position, /@/ as in "sofa," /i/ as in
"party," and /o/ as in "photo." So /i/ can act as an
unstressed vowel like /@/, which it clearly does in "the apple."
I've found a lot of my students, though, saying "th@ apple."
without an intervening glottal stop, so I suspect the @/i alternation in the
article is going the way of the a/an alternation. a/an does provide analogical
support for the instrumental case reflex, since the older indefinite form is
"an", not "a," and, as we all know, "napkin" and
"adder" arise from the confusion over whether the /n/ belongs to the
article or the noun. Rather like what happens with intrusive /r/ in some
r-less dialects. I tend to lean towards the instrumental reflex explanation
if only because it's the only one with any historical support.
Coincidentally, the /i/ of the instrumental would not have undergone the Great
Vowel Shift precisely because it's unstressed.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Bruce Despain [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: July 20, 2008 5:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Speaking of Elementary Concepts
Herb,
I wonder about the situation you did not mention where "the" is
pronounced "thee" before words beginning with a vowel (similar to the
environment of "an"). Thus we have "the apple" and
"the orange" etc. without the so-called reduced vowel (schwa) [unless
you mean to make this a different reduced vowel]. Whatever happened to the
phoneme? Can't we use morphonemics to describe these without getting
driven by phonetics to make them parts of other words (mostly nouns and
adjectives). Maybe we'd better [gwi:t] as in [letsgwi:t] (one word?).
Bruce
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2008 8:38 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Speaking of Elementary Concepts
All good questions. In morphology we generally distinguish between a lexeme
and the various forms that it can take. Stems and their inflected forms
generally comprise the variants of a lexeme, so "walked,"
"walks," "walking" are all variants of the lexeme WALK.
"Went" is a special case of this lexemic variation called
"suppletion," the substitution of an inflected form of one lexeme for
a form of another lexeme. In this case, "went" is the past tense of
"wend," a motion verb that we've pretty much lost in PDE except
in formulaic uses. Vowel changes from Old English to Middle English rendered
the present and past of "go" identical and so, probably for clarity,
speakers started using "went" for the past of "go" instead,
and it's been with us ever since. Inflectional morphology doesn't have
to be regular, so "gone" is also a variant of GO. The two uses of
"book" you give would be two different lexemes since their
relationship is derivational, by functional shift, not inflectional.
Derivational morphology produces new words; inflectional morphology does not.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Adams
Sent: 2008-07-19 19:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Speaking of Elementary Concepts
Herb's definition of a phonological word is very interesting. I hadn't
thought of that. But I think what I'm wondering about will be more clear if
I give a couple of examples.
Is walked a different word from walk or just a different form of walk?
Is went a different word from go or just a different form of go?
Is book in "I read a book" a different word from book in "we
always book our flights on Travelocity"?
Peter Adams
On Jul 19, 2008, at 8:45 AM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
With my classes I used to start with Leonard Bloomfield's definition,
"A word is a minimal free form." A word is the smallest thing that
you can say by itself without changing its phonological shape. So you can
pronounce "house" and "houses" but you can't pronounce
the plural suffix by itself, at least not without changing how it sounds or
having some phonetic training. In classes where we could explore this
definition more deeply, we'd look at the difference between a lexical word
and a phonological word. Lexically, we call "the" a word, but as
used in the sentence "The batter hit the ball," you have to either
say "the" stressed and with the vowel of "mud" or, with
phonetic training, you pronounce it as the unstressed syllable it is, complete
with reduced vowel, something most speakers can't do. So this would mean
that the phonological words would be "the batter" and "the
ball." This would get us into the question of what sort of unit
"the" is, which would introduce the notion "clitic" a
category of form with the property of affixes that it must be attached to
something, namely a phrasal category, and the property of a word that it
can't be attached to a word root."
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Peter Adams [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: July 19, 2008 12:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Speaking of Elementary Concepts
Can anyone help me out with a good definition or even simply a good way of
explaining what a word is?
Peter Adams
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