clitic
/ˈklɪtɪk
/noun Grammar
An unstressed word that normally occurs only in combination with another word, for example 'm in I’m.Null objects are allowed in many languages despite the absence of an object-identifying clitic or a verb - object agreement feature....
- In more prestigious varieties of Spanish, the clitic and object noun phrase are in complementary distribution (La vi or Vi a la mujer).
- Except for Obi-Wan, the good guys in the Star Wars original trilogy all spoke colloquial American English, clitics and all.
Derivatives
cliticization
- What seems to be excluded is a theory that analyzes both cliticization and quantifier float as local movement.
- Topics to be discussed are do-support, cliticisation phenomena and the interaction of stress and intonational phrasing with word order.
- In my PhD thesis, I've examined the inflectional behaviour of pronominal clitics in European Portuguese and developed an inflectional account of cliticisation.
cliticize
- As an IM, however, it underwent grammaticalization and was cliticized to the left of the verb.
- As adverbs, relators are cliticised onto postposition, again to further specify the meaning of the postposition.
- When negation cliticizes to the beginning of verbs and modals, the resulting combination is treated as a compound.
Origin
1940s: from (en)clitic and (pro)clitic.