UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 13 (2001)
Clitics in Word Grammar
DICK HUDSON
Clitics are a challenge for any view of the architecture of
grammar because they straddle the boundaries between words and morphemes and
between syntax and morphology. The paper shows that clitics
are syntactic words which also serve as word-parts, so their presence is
explained in terms of syntactic dependencies, but their position follows
morphological rules. The general analytical framework which is proposed builds
on the theory of Word Grammar. As expected, clitics
do demand a collection of special analytical categories - the word-classes Clitic and Hostword, and the
relationships ‘host’, ‘clitic’,
‘finite verb’ and ‘extension’ - but (unlike other
current theories of cliticization) they do not need
any extra theoretical apparatus. The paper considers simple clitics
in English and special clitics in French and Serbo-Croat.
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