Publication details
The Biennial of Czech Linguistics, panel Clitics: Phonology, morphology, syntax
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Workshop |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | One of the defining characteristics of clitics is phonological: they are accentless. Because they lack stress, they need to rely on a neighboring word in order to be pronounced within the same minimal prosodic unit: the prosodic word. This property also holds for affixes. Additional affix-like properties of clitics go beyond phonology: clitics cannot be focused, coordinated or modified (Zwicky 1985, Cardinaletti & Starke 1999, among others). In all these respects clitics behave like affixes. But on the other hand, they need not have a permanent predetermined host. The exact location of their pronunciation depends on the syntactic context they are used in. Specifically, the position that Czech clitics occupy is generally defined as the position after the first syntactic constituent of the clause (for relevant discussion, see Fried 1994, Toman 1996, Avgustinova & Oliva 1997, Lenertová 2004, Hana 2007, Tabachnick to appear), suggesting that clitic positioning is a matter of syntax. These descriptive observations lead to a tension. On the one side, clitics pattern with affixes, and on the other side, they behave like objects affected by syntactic processes. Given this tension, clitics allow linguists to explore some general questions concerning the boundaries of syntax, morphology and phonology. Moreover, clitics are found across a number Slavic languages and beyond, allowing for a fruitful cross-linguistic investigation (Marušič at al to appear). We welcome contributions that focus on phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic behaviour of clitics with special focus on Slavic. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): What kind of segmental and prosodic processes take place at the boundaries between clitics and non-clitics? Do clitics behave like words or affixes? Or are they unlike either of those? Does the special placement of clitics in the string (2nd position) interact with syntactic processes that are known to be sensitive to linear effects, such as coreference relations (binding)? Do general constraints on filler-gap dependencies (such as the Coordinate Structure Constraint) apply to clitics? To what extent can clitics be syncretic with (i.e., identical to) independent words on the one hand, and affixes on the other hand? Which morphological properties may be potentially characteristic of clitics as a grammatical class? |
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