10.6092/issn.2785-0943/16057
This paper offers and discusses a simple definition of the term clitic from a comparative perspective: A clitic is a bound morph that is neither an affix nor a root. It gives examples of several semantic and positional types of clitics from a wide range of languages, and it discusses some typical phonological effects associated with clitics. In the proposed definition, the crucial contrast between affixes and clitics is that affixes are class-selective (occurring always on nouns, on verbs, or on adjectives), while clitics do not exhibit word-class selectivity. In the stereotypical view of clitics, they are “prosodically deficient” in some way, but the phonological effects are quite diverse and cannot serve as a basis for a definition. As clitics are defined as kinds of minimal forms (or morphs), they cannot be nonsegmental, and they cannot interrupt another minimal form (so that there cannot be endoclitics by definition). Finally, I note that the object person indexes of the Romance languages, which have very often been called clitics, are actually affixes in the modern languages, although they must go back to earlier clitics.
application/pdf
2785-0943
16057
2
en
Martin Haspelmath
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads
object indexing 
Types of clitics in the world’s languages
Text.Serial.Journal
https://typologyatcrossroads.unibo.it/
3
Research articles
2023-12-27
2022-12-19
2023-12-27
2023-12-27
1-59
LTC
Martin Haspelmath
2023/12/27
10.6092/issn.2785-0943/16057
1
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
2785-0943
2
object indexing 
en
59
<p>Zwicky, Arnold M. 1994. What is a clitic? In Joel A. Nevis, Brian D. Joseph, Dieter Wanner &amp; Arnold M. Zwicky (eds.), <em>Clitics: a comprehensive bibliography 1892-1991</em>, xii&ndash;xx. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.</p>
Types of clitics in the world’s languages
https://typologyatcrossroads.unibo.it/article/download/16057/17227
3
         Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59                          ISSN 2785-0943



               Types of clitics in the world’s languages

                                       MARTIN HASPELMATH
                   MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY



                    Submitted: 19/12/2022               Revised version: 02/08/2023
                       Accepted: 02/08/2023                  Published: 27/12/2023



                   Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (The authors
                   remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article).




                                                   Abstract
This paper offers and discusses a simple definition of the term clitic from a comparative
perspective: A clitic is a bound morph that is neither an affix nor a root. It gives examples of
several semantic and positional types of clitics from a wide range of languages, and it
discusses some typical phonological effects associated with clitics. In the proposed definition,
the crucial contrast between affixes and clitics is that affixes are class-selective (occurring
always on nouns, on verbs, or on adjectives), while clitics do not exhibit word-class
selectivity. In the stereotypical view of clitics, they are “prosodically deficient” in some way,
but the phonological effects are quite diverse and cannot serve as a basis for a definition. As
clitics are defined as kinds of minimal forms (or morphs), they cannot be nonsegmental, and
they cannot interrupt another minimal form (so that there cannot be endoclitics by
definition). Finally, I note that the object person indexes of the Romance languages, which
have very often been called clitics, are actually affixes in the modern languages, although they
must go back to earlier clitics.


Keywords: clitic; affix; prosodic deficiency; word-class selectivity; object indexing.




1. Overview


This paper gives an overview of clitics in human languages, with an emphasis on clear
conceptual distinctions and straightforward terminology. In addition to exemplifying
a range of clitics from a wide variety of languages, I will discuss some of the earlier
conceptual and terminological distinctions, and I will say how the choices made here


https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2785-0943/16057                                                                              1
Haspelmath                                                 Types of clitics in the world’s languages


relate to the earlier literature. This paper thus has a clear methodological focus and
does not claim to make an empirical or explanatory contribution. I begin with the
definition of clitic as a comparative concept in (1), which is simple and clear.


(1)     Clitic
        A clitic is a bound morph that is neither an affix nor a root.


As a first illustration of clitics, consider the forms in boldface in (2)-(5), which are
typical examples of clitics.


(2)     English (Indo-European, Germanic)1
        my friend =’s house


(3)     Russian (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic)
        Pročita-la         =li     Anna knigu?
        read-PST           =PQ Anna book
        ‘Did Anna read a book?’


(4)     Persian (Indo-European, Indo-Iranic; Samvelian & Tseng 2010: 215)
        Ru-ye      miz     =aš           gozâšt-im.
        on-EZ      table =3SG.OBJ        put.PST-1PL.SBJ
        ‘We put it on the table.’


(5)     Tagalog (Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian; Kaufman 2010: 10)


a.      Na-túto            =siya         nang=          wika            =ng               Intsik.
        AV-learn           =3SG.NOM      GEN=           language        =LNK              Chinese
        ‘She learned Chinese.’
b.      Hindí      =siya           na-túto       nang=         wika              =ng      Intsik.
        NEG        =3SG.NOM        AV-learn      GEN=          language          =LNK Chinese
        ‘She didn’t learn Chinese.’




1
    The genealogical classification of the languages mentioned in this paper has been retrieved on
Glottolog.


                                                                                                       2
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


Traditionally, clitics have often been defined as prosodically deficient elements,
and/or as forms that are somehow intermediate between affixes and independent
words. Below in Section 5, I will explain why the definition in (1) is preferable, even
though it does not conform fully to some linguists’ intuitions about the nature of
clitics.
     To understand the definition adopted here, we need to understand the concepts of
bound morph and of affix. Briefly, a morph is a minimal form (Haspelmath 2020), a
bound form is a form that cannot occur in isolation (Bloomfield 1933: 160), and an
affix is a bound morph that is not a root and that always occurs on roots of the same
class (i.e. always on nouns, on verbs, or on adjectives; see Haspelmath 2021).
     The clitics in the initial examples given above are evidently not roots (i.e.
contentful morphs denoting an object, an action or a property; Haspelmath 2023),
and they are not affixes either because they may occur adjacent to different classes of
forms, as illustrated in (6) and (7) for English (eng; Indo-European, Germanic) and
Russian (rus; Indo-European, Balto-Slavic) (and also in (5a) and (5b) above for
Tagalog - tgl; Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian).


(6) English (Indo-European, Germanic)


a. my friend’s house                                     (adjacent to noun)
b. the lady I met yesterday’s offer                      (adjacent to adverb)
c.    the boy I like’s new bike                          (adjacent to verb)


(7) Russian (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic)


a. Pročita-la            li       Anna knigu?            (= 3; adjacent to verb)
      read-PST           PQ       Anna book
      ‘Did Anna read a book?’
b. Knigu         li      Anna pročita-la?                (adjacent to noun)
      book       PQ      Anna read-PST
      ‘Did Anna read a BOOK?’
c.    Včera              li       Anna čita-la?          (adjacent to adverb)
      yesterday          PQ       Anna read-PST
      ‘Did Anna read    YESTERDAY?’




                                                                                     3
Haspelmath                                                       Types of clitics in the world’s languages


This property of clitics is also called         NONSELECTIVITY,     contrasting with the       WORD-CLASS

SELECTIVITY     of affixes.2 An affix such as a Latin genitive suffix must always occur on a
noun (contrasting with English ’s, which can also occur on adverbs and verbs), and
an affix such as a German person-number suffix must always occur on a verb
(contrasting with Tagalog siya, which can occur on negation markers as well).
     It is thus their nonselectivity that picks out clitics in the definition that I use here
(see the further discussion in Section 6). Some linguists might prefer a
characterization of clitics that makes reference to their phonological properties, but
it seems impossible to define clitics phonologically (this is discussed in Section 7
below).
     In the next three sections (Sections 2-4), we will see examples of various types of
clitics from a wide range of languages, before we move on to a discussion of the
definition of the term clitic (Section 5). Then I will discuss the lack of word-class
selectivity (Section 6), before examining the phonological properties of clitics (Section
7). One consequence of the present definition is that clitics are concrete forms, so that
nonsegmental clitics or endoclitics cannot exist (Section 8). Finally, I will say a few
things about Romance object clitics, which have played a big role in the literature, but
which turn out to be affixes rather than clitics (Section 9).


2. Semantic types of clitics


2.1. Content words and function words


Linguists often distinguish between              CONTENT WORDS        and   FUNCTION WORDS.         Content
words are nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and function words are most other types of
words.3 They cannot be easily characterized positively, but there is widespread
agreement that the most important classes of function words are relators (adpositions,
subordinators), linkers (complementizers, coordinators), articles, tense-aspect
auxiliaries, and various kinds of discourse markers. What most function words share
(also with affixes) is that the information they convey is discursively secondary (Boye



2
    Instead of nonselectivity, the literature often uses the term promiscuous attachment or promiscuity (from
Zwicky 1987: 136). I used the latter term in the past, but it seems better to replace it with a term that
does not have unwanted associations. (Another possibility that I considered was indiscriminacy.)
3
    Some kinds of words, such as numerals and interjections, do not readily fit into this classification.


                                                                                                             4
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


& Harder 2012). The current section will illustrate various kinds of clitics, most of
which are function words.


2.2. Person indexes (= bound person forms)


Perhaps the best-known types of clitics are person indexes (Haspelmath 2013), and
especially the object indexes of the Romance languages have been discussed
extensively (in the wake of Kayne 1975). For example, Spanish te ‘you’ is a weak
object person form and contrasts with a strong form ti ‘YOU’.


(8)       Spanish (Indo-European, Italic)
          Te                quiero.
          you.ACC           love.1SG
          ‘I love you.’ (contrasting with quiero a ti ‘I love YOU’)


Below in Section 9 we will see that the Romance object person forms are not really
clitics, even though they are usually called clitics. But many other languages have
subject and/or object person clitics, e.g. Serbo-Croatian (hbs; Indo-European, Balto-
Slavic), where subject forms (for past tense constructions) like smo and object forms
like mu and je must occur in the second position.


(9)     Serbo-Croatian (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic; Bošković 2016: 28)


a.      Zašto     smo                 mu           je               predstavili     juče?
        why       1PL.SBJ             him.DAT      her.ACC          introduced      yesterday
        ‘Why did we introduce her to him yesterday?’
b.      Predstavili         smo            mu               je              juče.
        introduced          1PL.SBJ        him.DAT          her.ACC         yesterday
        ‘We introduced her to him yesterday.’


German (deu; Indo-European, Germanic) has a few clitic subject and object forms in
the colloquial language, illustrated in (10).4

4
    In this connection, English colloquial object forms are sometimes mentioned as well (e.g. hit ’em ‘hit
them’). But these English forms always follow the verb directly, so they are affixes rather than clitics




                                                                                                        5
Haspelmath                                                        Types of clitics in the world’s languages


(10) Colloquial German (Indo-European, Germanic)
      Willst             de       se         heute haben?
      want.2SG           you      them today have
      ‘Would you like to have them today?’ (Standard: Willst du sie heute haben?)


In Lak (lbe; Nakh-Daghestanian, Daghestanian), a subject person index usually
follows the verb, but when the focus is on an argument (the subject in (11b), the
object in (11c)), it follows this argument.


(11) Lak (Nakh-Daghestanian, Daghestanian; Kazenin 2002: 293)


a.    Na     q̄atri                    d-ullali-s̄a                =ra.
      I      house(G4)                 G4-build.DUR-PTCP           =1SG
      ‘I am building a house.’
b.    Na     =ra         q̄atri                   d-ullali-s̄a.
      I      =1SG        house(G4)                G4-build.DUR-PTCP

      ‘The one who is building a house is me.’
c.    Na     q̄atri                    =ra        d-ullali-s̄a.
      I      house(G4)                 =1SG       G4-build.DUR-PTCP

      ‘What I am building is a house.’


Clitic person indexes were also seen above in (4) (Persian) and (5) (Tagalog), and
more examples are given below: Halkomelem (hur; Salishan, Coast Salish) (14);
Bulgarian (bul; Indo-European, Balto-Slavic) (33), (52), (71b); Ancient Greek (grc;
Indo-European, Graeco-Phrygian) (42); Wambaya (wmb; Mirndi, Ngurlun) (43);
Polish (pol; Indo-European, Balto-Slavic) (58a); Kugu Nganhcara (wua; Pama-
Nyungan, Paman) (72); Udi (udi; Nakh-Daghestanian, Daghestanian) (84).


2.3. Tense-aspect forms


In many languages, tense-aspect meanings are expressed by verb-like auxiliaries, and
these are commonly bound non-affixal forms, i.e. clitics. For example, the French


(if one wants to treat them as distinct from the full forms). By contrast, German shortened forms like
se can occur both postverbally and in the first position of the Middle Field (e.g. wenn de se heute haben
willst ‘if you want them today’), so they are not class-selective and are thus clitics.


                                                                                                              6
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


auxiliary avoir ‘have’ is used to form a past tense, and it is a (nonaffixed) bound form
rather than a free form, as it must always cooccur with a verb. In (12), for example,
the second verb cannot be omitted.5 This contrasts with English, where the perfect
auxiliary have can occur without the verb and is thus not a bound form.


(12) French (Indo-European, Italic)
        J’ai      changé           et      mon     mari            a       changé           aussi.
        I have changed             and     my      husband         has     changed          too
        ‘I have changed and my husband has Ø, too.’ (*J’ai changé et mon mari a Ø aussi.)


Two more examples of tense-aspect clitics come from Garrwa (wrk; Garrwan) and,
Halkomelem.


(13) Garrwa (Garrwan; Mushin 2012: 206–207)


a.      Jungku yal        =i        bangkulu-na.
        stay      3PL     =PST      prison-LOC
        ‘They stayed in the prison.’
b.      Najba     =yi     bula.
        see       =PST 3DU.NOM
        ‘They two saw him.’


(14) Halkomelem (Salishan, Coast Salish; Gerdts & Werle 2014: 251)
        Nem’      =ʔə     =č                    =ceʔ q’waɬ-ət      ɬə      sti:č?
        go        =QM =2SG.SBJ                  =FUT wait-TR       DET     bus
        ‘Are you going to wait for the bus?’


More tense-aspect clitics are illustrated below: Wambaya (43), English (59), Italian
(ita; Indo-European, Italic) (63), Bulgarian (71b).




5
    Note that the French auxiliary avoir is not prefixal as it need not occur immediately before the verb
(e.g. il a probablement changé ‘he has probably changed’).


                                                                                                       7
Haspelmath                                                Types of clitics in the world’s languages


2.4. Articles


Definite and indefinite articles accompany nouns and cannot occur on their own, so they
are bound forms. In some languages, they always occur directly on nouns and are thus
affixes, e.g. in Swedish (Indo-European, Germanic) (kung-en [king-DEF] ‘the king’). In
other languages, they occur in a peripheral position and noun modifiers may intervene,
e.g. in Italian, Basque (eus; Isolate, Eurasia) and Haitian Creole (hat; French-based creole,
North America). Such articles are clitics, regardless of their spelling (in Basque, the article
is written as if it were a suffix: etxea, etxe berria).


(15) Italian (Indo-European, Italic)


a.    il         libro
      the        book
b.    l’         altro libro
      the        other book


(16) Basque (Isolate, Eurasia)


a.    etxe       =a
      house      =ART
      ‘the house’
b.    etxe       berri =a
      house      new =ART
      ‘the new house’


(17) Haitian (French-based creole, North America; Fattier 2013)
      M          wè      ti    nèg     ki      frekan         =an
      1SG        see     little man    REL     impertinent =DEF
      ‘I saw the boy who is impertinent.’


Cases like Haitian Creole, where articles occur even outside of relative clauses, are
uncommon, but clitic articles are widespread. English the and a(n) are subminimal
(lacking a full vowel), so that they are recognized as clitics even by authors who do
not rely on the nonselectivity criterion (e.g. Dixon 2007).



                                                                                                      8
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


     Examples of a few more clitic articles are given below: Welsh (cym; Indo-European,
Celtic) (37), Bulgarian (45, 53), Italian (63).


2.5. Question and negation particles


Polar question markers are typically clitics, because they can often be associated
with a variable focus of the question (as seen in (7a-c) for Russian, and in (54)
below for Turkish - tur; Turkic, Common Turkic). In languages where a question
particle must occur in a peripheral position, it is still often a clitic because the
initial or final expression of the question is not always of the same class. For
example, in Mauwake (mhl; Nuclear Trans-New Guinea, Madang), the polar
question clitic =i may occur on verbs or on nominals.


(18) Mauwake (Nuclear Trans-New Guinea, Madang; Berghäll 2015: 226)


a.     Sira     nain     piipua-inan         =i?
       habit    that     leave-FUT.2SG =QM
       ‘Will you give up that habit?’
b.     Nobonob         ikiw-e-man nain,        owowa eliwa =i?
       Nobonob         go-PST-2PL that         village good =QM
       ‘You went to Nobonob, is it a good village?’


In Mapudungun (arn; Araucanian, Mapudungun), the question marker =am may
occur in polar questions or constituent questions, and it can occur after different kinds
of words.


(19) Mapudungun (Araucanian, Mapudungun; Zúñiga 2014: 165)
       Nepe-le-y            ñi   püñeñ    =am?
       wake.up-RES-IND my child               =QM
       ‘Is my child awake?’


Languages with polar question markers as verbal affixes are not uncommon either,
even though they are less frequent than question particles (Dryer 2005 finds 600
languages with question particles, and 179 languages with “interrogative verb




                                                                                       9
Haspelmath                                                        Types of clitics in the world’s languages


morphology”). In these languages, the polar question marker by definition always
occurs on the verb.6
     Clitic negation particles are quite common, too, and are illustrated below in (52)
for Bulgarian and in (58) for Polish.


2.6. Adpositions


In the general literature on clitics, adpositions are not very prominent, though Dixon
(2007) notes that several English prepositions (at, for, to, etc.) are very much like
English auxiliaries and person forms in that they exhibit full forms and shortened
forms. But crucially in the present context, adpositions are bound forms which
indicate a nominal’s semantic role and which do not always occur on the noun, so
they are clitics by definition. Two examples are given in (20)-(21).


(20) Korean (Koreanic; Chae 2020: 133)
        Wuli-nun       siktang=eyse       achim         pap =ul        mek-ess-ta.
        we-TOP         restaurant=in morning meal =ACC eat-PST-DECL
        ‘We ate breakfast in a restaurant.’


(21) Ts’ixa (Khoe-Kwadi, Khoe; Fehn 2016: 108)
        Maá.|àm̀ tsá        gérè táùn=m̀           ʔò         ̄́ ̄̀?
                                                           kūu
        when        2SG.M   FUT   town=SG.M        ALL     go
        ‘When will you go to town?’


A few more examples of adpositional clitics are given below: Sri Lanka Malay (sci;
Malay-based creole, Eurasia) (28), Russian (55), Fwe (fwe; Atlantic-Congo, Volta-
Congo) (70), as well as in (47). I do not exemplify the nonselectivity of all these
markers here, but all of them occur not only next to nouns, but also next to noun
modifiers, as seen in (47a) and (70b) (see also fn. 19 for Japanese postposed flags).


6
    Dryer does not say so explicitly, but it appears that his particles are always nonselective (occurring
adjacent to different types of words), while his affixes (or other morphology) are always verb-specific.
He notes the nonselectivity requirement only for particles that are called clitics by the language
describers: “Interrogative clitics, which attach to some word, but which exhibit freedom as to the
category of word they attach to, are treated here as question particles.” (Dryer 2005: 470)




                                                                                                              10
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


2.7. Subordinators


Like adpositions, subordinators are generally bound forms, and they are often
nonselective as well, so that they are clitics rather than suffixes. Their clitic nature is
particularly salient when there is phonological reduction, as with English that [ðət],
French que/qu’ (reduced before a vowel), or in the Chadic language Makary Kotoko
(mpi; Afro-Asiatic, Chadic) gí/g- (reduced before a vowel):


(22) Makary Kotoko (Afro-Asiatic, Chadic; Allison 2020: 268)
      Ā                gə ən        g=               ú    sī     klayaskə̄́.
      2SG.M.COMPL say 1SG           COMP=            1SG take    young.woman
      ‘He told me to take a young woman (as wife).’


In languages with predominant verb-final order, subordinators are often verbal
suffixes (attaching only to verbs), but Turkish =(y)ken ‘when’ is a clitic as it attaches
both to verbs and to nouns (Erdal 2000: 42).


(23) Turkish (Turkic, Common Turkic; Göksel & Kerslake 2005: 416)


a.    Orman-da         dolaş-ır     =ken         bir     tilki   gör-dü-m.
      forest-LOC       walk-AOR =when            a       fox     see-PST-1SG
      ‘While walking in the forest, I saw a fox.’
b.    Ahmet        o      kitab-ı      öğrenci =yken oku-muş.
      Ahmet        that book-ACC student =when read-PRF
      ‘Ahmet read that book as (‘when’) a student, it seems.’


A few more examples of subordinator clitics are given in (48) below.


2.8. Coordinators


Coordinators meaning and or or are typically clitics, because they do not occur on
their own and combine with forms of different word classes.




                                                                                        11
Haspelmath                                                 Types of clitics in the world’s languages


(24) Amharic (Afro-Asiatic, Semitic; Demeke & Meyer 2008: 616)
     Sɛw-u=mm          nəgus-u=mm           dɛnɛggɛṭ-u.
     man-DEF=CONJ king-DEF=CONJ be.surprised-3PL
     ‘The people as well as the king were both surprised.’


(25) Tsimshian (or Sm’algyax; Tsimshian; Stebbins 2003: 395)
     Łgu      Hayda         ˈyuuta gwa̠ˈa̠ daˈal aam           wila     Smˈalgya̠x-t.
     small    Haida         man      this     but     good     FOC      Sm’algyax-3.SBJ
     ‘This young man is Haida but he speaks good Sm’algyax.’


A few more examples of coordinator clitics are given in (49) below, as well as in (31b)
(English and=), (56) (Latin =que), and (83) (Andi =lo=).


2.9. Information-structural and discourse markers


Topic and focus markers are often clitics, as illustrated in (26)-(28), where they follow
an adverb or a postposition.


(26) Karbi (Sino-Tibetan, Kuki-Chin-Naga; Konnerth 2020: 466)
     Pinì=ke             etūm             àn        chō-ràp-pèt-sināng.
     today=TOP            1PL.INCL          rice      eat-together-all-HORT
     ‘Today, let us eat together.’


(27) Bunaq (Timor-Alor-Pantar; Schapper 2022: 174)
     Neto     Hulul gene=na          zol.
     1SG      Hulul   LOC=FOC        originate
     ‘It is Hulul where I come from.’


(28) Sri Lanka Malay (Malay-based creole, Eurasia; Nordhoff 2009: 275)
     TV=ka=jo               anà-kuthumung.
     TV=LOC=EMPH            PST-see

     ‘It was on TV that we saw it.’


Further examples of clitic discourse markers are English however in (39) and
German já in (78).



                                                                                                       12
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


3. Positional types of clitics


With respect to their position, we can distinguish several subtypes of clitics: at the
most general level, we can distinguish enclitics and proclitics as well as ambiclitics
(Section 3.1) and interclitics (Section 3.2). Using further kinds of criteria, we can also
define second-position clitics (Section 3.3), clustering clitics (Section 3.4), and
epiphrasal clitics (which occur at the edge of a clause, a nominal, or an adverbial;
Section 3.5). These classes are not necessarily mutually exclusive.


3.1. Enclitics and proclitics


The two best-known types are enclitics and proclitics, defined as in (29)-(30). (More
transparent terms would be postclitic and preclitic, but two terms enclitic and proclitic
are fairly old and are based on Greek prefixes, not on Latin post-/pre-.)7


(29) Enclitic
        An enclitic is a clitic that can occur at the end of a free form but not at the
        beginning.


(30) Proclitic
        A proclitic is a clitic that can occur at the beginning of a free form but not at the
        end.


For example, English Genitive ’s can occur at the end of an elliptical answer, as in
(31a), and the English coordinator and can occur at the beginning of the elliptical
expression and her dog, as in (31b).


(31) a.           A: Is this your bike? B: No, (it’s) my friend’s.
        b.        A: Who is coming? B: My friend Lee. C: And her dog!


The opposite situations are quite impossible (my friend’s bike cannot under any
circumstances be shortened to *’s bike, and Lee and her dog cannot be shortened to

7
    The simple (prefixless) term clitic is actually fairly new (going back to Nida 1946; Stockwell et al.
1965). In earlier grammatical descriptions of the classical languages, we mostly find enclitic, but proclitic
was already used in the 19th century.


                                                                                                         13
Haspelmath                                                   Types of clitics in the world’s languages


*Lee and), so the reduced free forms in (31a-b) are the basis for classifying ’s as an
enclitic and and as a proclitic.
     The nonclitic word preceding an enclitic, and the nonclitic word following a
proclitic, will be called its   ANCHOR   in this paper. According to another very common
terminology, the element with which a clitic can occur in such contexts is its                     HOST,

and an equals sign serves as a boundary symbol linking a clitic to its host, as in (32).
In many or most cases, anchor and host refer to the same word.


(32) a.         my friend=s bik
       b.       Lee and=her=dog


It is often said that “a clitic attaches to its host”, and the equals sign is generally taken
as signaling this kind of attachment, but it is typically unclear what exactly this means.
(In this paper, I do not attach particular significance to the notation with the equals
sign. It can always be replaced by a space.)
     Most often, linguists say that clitics form a prosodic unit (such as a phonological
word) with their hosts, and they generally attribute this to their phonological
“deficiency” (Halpern 1998: Section 1):


       Clitics which form a prosodic unit with a host on their left are enclitics, while
       those forming a unit to their right are proclitics.


However, as will be discussed further in Section 7 below, it is often unclear how to
identify the relevant prosodic units. Consider the Bulgarian object person index ja
‘her’, which occurs postverbally when the verb is clause-initial (as in (33a)), but
preverbally when there is another preverbal constituent (as in (33b)). It cannot occur
preverbally in initial position (see (33c)).


(33) Bulgarian (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic; Avgustinova 1994: 31)


a.     Vidjax ja.
       I.saw    her
       ‘I saw her.’




                                                                                                         14
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


b.     Otnovo ja          vidjax.
       again    her       I.saw.
       ‘I saw her again.’
c.     *Ja      vidjax.
       her      I.saw
       (‘I saw her.’)


According to the prosodic-unit criterion, should we say that ja in (33b) is proclitic to
the verb, or that it is enclitic to the adverb? This is unclear and may not even be
decidable, so it is better to define enclitic and proclitic with respect to their peripheral
occurrence in free forms. According to this criterion, ja is an enclitic, because (33a)
is possible as a free form, but (33c) is not. Thus, otnovo is the anchor in (33b), but it
may not be the prosodic host.
     A clear case of divergence between the criterion of occurrence in a free form and
the prosodic criterion comes from Czech (ces; Indo-European, Balto-Slavic). Here too,
the cognate person clitics are enclitic as that they cannot (in the formal standard
variety) occur at the beginning of a free form. But according to Toman (1996), they
lean prosodically to the following word when they occur after a long nominal phrase,
as in (34), that forms a separate prosodic constituent.


(34) Czech (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic; Toman 1996: 506)
       Knihy, které tady            vidíte,       se     dnes   platí        zlatem.
       books    which here          see.PRS.2PL   REFL   today pay.PRS.PL    gold.INS
       ‘The books you can see here are paid for with gold today.’


There are sometimes clear segmental effects depending on a neighbouring form, e.g.
regressive voicing assimilation, as in English (34a) vs. (34b), or otherwise alternating
forms, like Tagalog ng (after a vowel) vs. na (after a consonant), as in (35a) vs. (35b).


(34) a.         my friend=[z] car
       b.       my bike=[s] brakes


(35) a.         wika      ng        Ingles        ‘English language’ (cf. also (5a))
       b.       Ingles na           wika          ‘English language’




                                                                                         15
Haspelmath                                                    Types of clitics in the world’s languages


However, the directionality of these segmental effects need not correspond exactly to
the prosodic associations. For example, in English, it may appear that the copula
forms is and are form a unit with the subject, as in (36a-b). However, the segmental
effect in (36c) depends on the following word: In non-rhotic varieties of English, the
reduced form ’re is pronounced [r] only when the following word begins with a vowel
(Dixon 2007: 583).


(36) a.           The girl’s here.                      [z]
       b.         The kids’re here.                     [ə]
       c.         The kids’re outside.                  [r]


Even more strikingly, the shape of the Welsh definite article y/yr/’r depends both on
the preceding and on the following word, as seen in (37a-c). The shape yr occurs in a
C_V context, the shape y in a C_C context, and ’r in a V_ context (both V_C and V_V)
(Hannahs & Tallerman 2006).


(37) Welsh (Indo-European, Celtic)


a.     Prynodd           y       bachgen          yr    unig               lyfr.
       bought            the     boy              the   only               book
       ‘The boy bought the only book.’
b.     Prynodd           y       bachgen          y     llyfr.
       bought            the     boy              the   book
       ‘The boy bought the book.’
c.     Brynaist          ti      ’r      llyfr?
       bought.2SG        you     the     book
       ‘Did you buy the book?’


The Welsh definite article is a proclitic (as it occurs preceding a noun in isolation, e.g.
y llyfr ‘the book’), but its shape is crucially determined by the preceding word when
it does not occur initially.
     For these reasons, the definitions in (29) and (30) do not make reference to
prosodic units, but only to occurrence in free forms (i.e. as part of forms that can
occur in isolation). We will see below in Section 7 that occurrence in isolation is not
the same as absence of phonological deficiency.



                                                                                                          16
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


   Most clitics are enclitics or proclitics, but there are two other possibilities,
ambiclitics and interclitics (Section 3.2). Ambiclitics are clitics that may look like a
proclitic or like an enclitic, e.g. English however.


(38) Ambiclitic
      An ambiclitic is a clitic that can occur at the end of a free form or at the
      beginning.


It is not usual to qualify however as a clitic, but as it does not occur on its own and is
neither a root nor an affix, it is a clitic on the definition of this paper. It can occur
initially, medially, or finally in a free form.


(39) a.         However, our ambitious proposal failed.
      b.        Our ambitious proposal, however, failed.
      c.        Our ambitious proposal failed, however.


Another example is the German adposition entgegen ‘against’, which can be used
prepositionally or postpositionally (entgegen meinem Rat ‘against my advice’ or
meinem Rat entgegen, van Gijn & Zúñiga 2014: 150).


3.2. Interclitics


Some languages have clitics that must occur between two other forms. These are
called interclitics here, defined as in (40).


(40) Interclitic
      An interclitic is a clitic that can occur neither at the end of a free form nor at
      the beginning.


An example is the Taglog linker =ng/na=, which was already illustrated in (35a-b)
above. Further examples are in (41a-b). This morph (with variant ng after a vowel,
and na after a consonant) occurs between an attributive adjective and a noun (these
two elements may occur in either order). According to the positional criterion, it is
an interclitic, not an enclitic or proclitic, despite the “backward-leaning” phonological
behaviour of =ng=.


                                                                                       17
Haspelmath                                                     Types of clitics in the world’s languages


(41) Tagalog (Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian)


a.       Malaki =ng=               bahay
         big      =LNK=            house
         ‘big house’
b.       bahay    =na=             malaki
         house    =LNK=            big
         ‘big house’


An even better-known example of an interclitic is the Persian Ezâfe form =(y)e=, as
in lebâs =e= zibâ =ye= Maryam [dress =EZ= beautiful =EZ= Maryam] ‘Maryam’s
beautiful dress’ (Samvelian 2007: 608). This form occurs before an adnominal
modifier, but only when a noun or another modifier precedes. It never occurs at the
beginning or end of a free form.8 Another example of an interclitic is the shortened
English copula (’s, ’re), illustrated in (36a-c) above.
     Interclitics could be said to have two anchors, and the same might be said about
ambiclitics when they occur in medial position (as in 39b). But it it is unclear how
to treat ambiclitics in general, so it may be best to restrict the term anchor to
enclitics and proclitics for simplicity.


3.3. Second-position clitics


A number of languages have clitics which must occur in the second position in a
clause (see Bošković 2016 for a survey). We saw a Tagalog example in (5a-b), a
Russian example in (7a-c), and a Serbo-Croatian example in (9a-b). Clitics of this type
were first identified for Ancient Greek, illustrated in (42).


(42) Ancient Greek (Indo-European, Graeco-Phrygian; Sappho 118.3, Wackernagel
         2020: 60)
         Aithiopíāi       me               korai          Latoûs           anéthēken
         Ethiopian.DAT me.ACC               girl.DAT       Leto.GEN         dedicated




8
    Samvelian (2007) treats the marker =(y)e= as a suffix, but it occurs both after nouns and adjectives,
so it is not class-selective and hence a clitic.


                                                                                                           18
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


       Arista.
       Arista.NOM
       ‘Aristas dedicated me to Leto’s Ethiopian daughter.’


Wackernagel’s (1892) paper made second-position clitics famous by pointing out that
they occur in a number of ancient Indo-European languages (see Walkden 2020 for
some background). Clitics of this type have also been found in various other parts of
the world, including Uto-Aztecan languages, Panoan languages, and a number of
Australian languages such as Wambaya.


(43) Wambaya (Mirndi, Ngurlun; Nordlinger 1998: 139, 140)


a.     Darranggu-nu ngiyi=ng=a                                               irrijabi.
       stick-LOC         3SG.NONMASC.ERG=1.OBJ=NONFUT                        scratch
       ‘The stick scratched me.’
b.     Daguma gini=ng=a                                    ngirra.
       hit       3SG.MASC.ERG=1.OBJ=NONFUT                 us.EXCL.ACC
       ‘He hit us.’
c.     Guyala ngurr=uji                           ngajbi             irra.
       NEG       1PL.INCL.ERG=IRR.PRS             see                them.ACC
       ‘We have never seen them.’


Nordlinger (1998) calls the second-position clitic clusters auxiliary and writes them
as one word, but they are not different in nature from the Tagalog or Serbo-Croation
clusters.
     Second-position clitics are usually enclitics, but it may be that some of them are
interclitics (requiring another form to follow). I define this type as in (44).


(44) Second-position clitic
       A second-position clitic is a clitic that must occur (possibly as part of a clitic
       cluster) directly after the first word or nominal or adverbial expression of a
       clause, or after the first word of a nominal.


Most second-position clitics occur after the first nominal or adverbial of a clause, or
after an initial verb or particle (as in (43b-c)), and it is rare to find such clitics after


                                                                                         19
Haspelmath                                            Types of clitics in the world’s languages


the first word when this is part of a nominal. An example of such a nominal-internal
clausal clitic is (42) from Lesbian Greek.
     For the definition in (44), one might want to use the more general formulation
“must occur after the first constituent”, but the terms nominal (expression) and
adverbial (expression) are very clear (and word is fairly clear, too), while constituent is
more abstract and may not be so clear. In the literature, there are rich discussions of
the precise conditions under which second-positions occur in particular languages,
often involving prosodic conditions (see, e.g., Bošković 2016). However, the vast
majority of what have been called second-position clitics fall under the comparative
concept in (44).
     Second-position clitics within nominals can be illustrated by the Bulgarian definite
article in (45).


(45) Bulgarian (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic; Halpern 1995: 153)


a.      kniga    =ta
        book     =DEF
        ‘the book’
b.      xubava =ta        kniga
        nice     =DEF book
        ‘the nice book’
c.      moja=ta           xubava    kniga
        my=DEF            nice      book
        ‘my nice book’


Not only articles, but also adpositions may occur in second position, though this is
rare. Dryer (2005: 211) calls such clitics inpositions and gives an example from Yawuru
(ywr; Nyulnyulan, Eastern Nyulnyulan).


(46) Yawuru (Nyulnyulan, Eastern Nyulnyulan; Hosokawa 1991: 81, 383–384)


a. dyungku       =gun
     fire =LOC
     ‘in the fire’




                                                                                                  20
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


b.    bika=gun           larrkadi
      shade=LOC          bottle.tree
      ‘in the shade of a bottle-tree’
c.    nyamba =gun                maya
      this       =LOC            house
      ‘in this house’


3.4. Epiphrasal clitics


Many languages have clitics that provide information on a phrase’s relationship with
its environment and occur peripherally, either in a nominal expression (i.e.
adpositions), or in a clause (i.e. subordinators) (as we already saw in Sections 2.6-7).
They may be proclitics or enclitics.


(47) Examples of adpositional clitics


a.    English:           to      ‘to’             to our house
b.    French:            pour    ‘for’            pour notre maison ‘for our house’
c.    Hebrew:            le-     ‘to’             le=David ‘to David’
d.    Japanese:          no      ‘of’             Hanako=no ‘of Hanako’


(48) Examples of subordinator clitics


a.    German:            als     ‘when’           als wir träumten      ‘when we were dreaming’
b.    Persian:           ke      ‘that’           ke âmadi              ‘that you came’
c.    Arabic:            iðaa    ‘if’             iðaa kun-ta hunaaka ‘if you-are there’
d.    Chinese:           de      ‘which’          [lái de] nánhai       ‘the boy [who came]’


Another class of clitics that commonly occur peripherally to a phrase is coordinator
clitics (as already seen in Section 2.8). These are often interclitics.


(49) Examples of coordinator clitics (Fortescue 1984: 120)


a.    Spanish:           y       ‘and’            guerra y paz ‘war and peace’
b.    Lezgian:           ni      ‘and’            buba=ni died ‘father and mother’


                                                                                               21
Haspelmath                                                     Types of clitics in the world’s languages


c.      Russian:           ili     ‘or’            zdes’ ili tam ‘here or there’
d.      Greenlandic:       =lu     ‘and’           ingilluni=lu ‘and she sat down’


Many or most languages also have focus clitics, especially particles meaning ‘only’ or
‘also’, which typically occur epiphrasally, as in (50a-c).


(50) Focus clitics


a.      Polish:            tylko ‘only’            tylko dzisiaj ‘only today’
b.      M. Greek:          ke      ‘too ‘          ke i mitéra mu ‘my mother, too’
c.      Hungarian:         is      ‘too’           én is ‘me too’
d.      Japanese:          mo      ‘too’           watashi mo ‘me too’


However, especially clitics that mean ‘also’ can occur in a floating position, not
immediately adjacent to their focus. Example (51) shows the stressed clitic auch,
which can occur in a preverbal position, not adjacent to its focus. Thus,                       AUCH   is a
clitic, but it is not ephiphrasal.


(51) German9 (Indo-European, Germanic)
        Meine     Schwester        ist      heute =AUCH             gekommen.
        my        sister           has      today =also             come
        ‘My sister came today, too (= ‘also my sister’ or ‘also today’).’


A non-peripheral position is not common for the other semantic classes illustrated
above, though we sometimes find second-position coordinators (e.g. in Latin, ex. (56)
below), and occasionally second-position adpositions (e.g. Yawuru, ex. (46) above).
     Epiphrasal clitics are very common, but they are not prominent in the general-
theoretical literature on clitics. This is probably because they present no particular
problem of analysis, and not because they would not fall under the usual clitic
concept.



9
    German stressed AUCH is an enclitic, because it can occur at the end of a free form (e.g. heute =AUCH
‘today, too’). There is also a fully synonymous unstressed auch (used in a more formal register), which
is a proclitic, because it can occur at the beginning of a free form (auch= HEUTE ‘also today’). If these
two instances of auch were treated as the same form, this form would be an ambiclitic.


                                                                                                           22
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


3.5. Clustered clitics


Clitics sometimes occur in clusters with rigid internal ordering. Such clusters may
occur in second position (as we already saw for Tagalog, Serbo-Croatian, and
Wambaya, Section 3.3), but they can also be proclitic, as in the Bulgarian example in
(52). Here the clitics occur in a rigid position: da –                  NEG   –   AUX   –   DAT   –   ACC   (see
Avgustinova 1994: 32 for details).          10




(52) Bulgarian (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic; Spencer & Luís 2012: 125)
         Da        ne      si               mu              go                dala      poveče!
         that      not     2SG.AUX          3SG.DAT         3SG.ACC           give      more
         ‘Don’t give it to him any more, or else!’


For syntactic elements, this kind of rigid ordering is not expected, and this has led
some linguists to think of clustered clitics more in morphological terms. More
generally, Spencer & Luís (2012: 126) note that:


         elements that are traditionally called clitics may exhibit a good many features
         normally associated with affixes ... when they combine into clusters: a fixed order,
         idiosyncratic alternations in ordering, haplology, idiosyncratic allomorphy, and
         accidental gaps, not to mention multiple exponence and cumulation.


This is another reason for caution in attributing the properties of types of linguistic
forms to larger architectures (“morphology vs. syntax”, “grammar vs. lexicon”, etc.).
At present, our understanding of the reasons for these behaviours is quite limited.


4. Phonological types of clitics


In this section, I describe and illustrate three types of clitics based on their
phonological properties: welded clitics (Section 4.1), stress-affecting clitics (Section
4.2), and shortened clitics (Section 4.3).


10
     Above in (33), we saw that single object clitics are enclitics, but (52) shows that when they occur in
a cluster that begins with da=, the entire cluster is proclitic. So perhaps we should say that object
clitics are ambiclitics, because they can occur both at the end of a free form and (as part of a cluster)
at the beginning of a free form.


                                                                                                             23
Haspelmath                                                  Types of clitics in the world’s languages


4.1. Welded clitics


A welded clitic is a clitic that interacts with a neighboring form in a segmental way,
either by causing segmental change or by undergoing segmental change. For example,
the Bulgarian enclitic definite article (-ət/-ta/-to in the singular, see (45)) may cause
a segmental change in the preceding noun, as seen in (53); the Turkish question
particle mU shows vowel harmony, harmonizing with the last vowel of the preceding
word, as seen in (54); and several Russian prepositions (e.g. v(o), k(o), o(b)) have
somewhat different shape variants depending on various properties of the next word,
as seen in (55).


(53) Bulgarian (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic): definite article
     kniga     [book]            kniga-ta        [book-DEF]
     vol       [ox]              vol-ət          [ox-DEF]
     grək      [Greek]           gərk-ət         [Greek-DEF] (with stem change)


(54) Turkish (Turkic, Common Turkic): polar question particle
     geldí mi?          ‘did she come?’
     öldü mü?          ‘did he die?’
     Alí mi?            ‘Ali?’
     dün mü?           ‘yesterday?’


(55) Russian (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic): prepositions v(o) ‘in’, s(o) ‘with’
     v nužde            ‘in need’          vo vrede     ‘in harm’ (*v vrede)
     s radost’ju        ‘with joy’         so straxom   ‘with fear’ (*s straxom)


In English, the difference between the two variants of the indefinite article a(n) (e.g.
a tree vs. an old tree) is a striking case of welding in a proclitic.
  For welded clitics, we might distinguish between                  BACKWARD-WELDED           clitics
(whose segmental shape interacts with the shape of a preceding form) and
FORWARD-WELDED        clitics (which interact with a following form). In general,
backward-welded clitics are enclitics, e.g. the Turkish polar question particle
mi/mü/mu/mı, and forward-welded forms are proclitics, e.g. the Russian
prepositions v(o) and s(o). But proclitics may also be backward-welded, as seen in
the Welsh definite article yr/’r in (37) above, and enclitics may be forward-welded



                                                                                                        24
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


(e.g. Kukama =pura, discussed by Zingler 2020: 266). Quite generally, it seems that
backward-welding is more common than forward-welding (Himmelmann 2014). The
interclitics that we saw in Section 3.2 are backward-welded (Tagalog na/ng, Persian
e/ye).
     Welding does not seem to happen very often with clitics, and it has in fact been
suggested that “morphophonological idiosyncrasies” are symptomatic of affixes, but
not of clitics (Zwicky & Pullum 1983: 504; Nevis 2000: 389).11 If phonological
interaction plays no role in the definition (as in the present proposal), then the lack
(or scarcity) of segmental interactions between clitics and adjacent words becomes
an interesting testable prediction that we can make.


4.2. Stress-affecting clitics


Most clitics do not interact suprasegmentally (with respect to their stress or tone
properties) with adjacent words, and we can call them suprasegmentally inert. For
example, while most Turkish words have final stress, the question clitic (e.g. geldí mi?
‘did she come?’ in (54) above) is not part of the stress domain and thus does not carry
stress. But some clitics are suprasegmentally active in that they are relevant for the
stress or tone properties of their anchor words (or perhaps for other adjacent words).
Here we will briefly consider clitics which affect the stress of their anchor word.
     We can distinguish two types of stress-affecting clitics. First, STRESS-SHIFTING CLITICS
are clitics which induce a shift of the stress pattern of their anchor word. For example,
the Latin conjunctive clitic =que induces a stress shift to the final syllable of the
anchor word that it annexes to (see Plank 2005).


(56) Latin (Indo-European, Italic)


a.      ménsa             ‘the table’
b.      mensá=que         ‘and the table’




11
     Conceivably, this could be because clitics are combined “postlexically” with their anchors, while
affixes are combined “lexically” and thus undergo “lexical phonological” processes (e.g. Anderson
2005). But on such a view, it is puzzling that phenomena such as Bulgarian grək ~ gərk-ət as in (53)
are attested at all (see also Halpern 1995 on “lexical clitics”, and Spencer & Luís 2012: Section 4.4.3).


                                                                                                      25
Haspelmath                                            Types of clitics in the world’s languages


A similar effect is found in Modern Greek (ell; Indo-European, Graeco-Phrygian),
where enclitics (such as mas ‘our’, mu ‘my’) are unstressed but induce an additional
stress on anchor words that are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable, as illustrated
in (57b). Words that are stressed on the penultimate or ultimate syllable are
unaffected, as seen in (57c-d).


(57) Modern Greek (Indo-European, Graeco-Phrygian; van Oostendorp 2012: 1166)


a.     o jítonas                 ‘the neighbour’
b.     o jìtonáz=mas            ‘our neighbour’
c.     i stafíða=mu              ‘my raisin’       (i stafíða)
d.     i aɣorá=mas               ‘our market’      (i aɣorá)


Stress-shifting clitics seem to be rare, but they have been prominent in the literature,
because Greek and Latin are such important languages in Western culture, and the
term enclitic was originally used for stress-shifting Greek clitics.
     The second type is STRESS-INTEGRATED CLITICS. These are clitics which are part of the
anchor word’s stress domain and carry stress when the general stress rule would
assign stress to them. An example is the Polish negator nie, which is stressed when it
occurs with a monosyllabic verb form.


(58) Polish (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic; Rubach & Booij 1985: 317)


a.     nie         wiedziáła=m
       NEG         knew=1SG
       ‘I did not know’
b.     nié         wie-m
       NEG         know-1SG
       ‘I do not know’


In this regard, the negator nie contrasts with the polar question particle czy, which is
a clitic, too (czy wiém? ‘do I know?’), but which behaves like most clitics in that it is




                                                                                                  26
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


outside the stress domain.12 Another clitic that is inside the stress domain is
Mapudungun =ám (seen in example (19) above), which receives stress as consonant-
final words have final stress (Zúñiga 2014: 165).13


4.3. Shortened clitics (vs. length-invariant clitics)


Some clitics are closely related to formally similar counterparts and can be regarded
as abbreviated variants of them. This type is very well known from English, illustrated
in (59).


(59) English (Indo-European, Germanic)
         FULL      SHORTENED

         will      ’ll
         would     ’d
         is        ’s
         are       ’re


(60) German (Indo-European, Germanic) (see (10) above)
         FULL      SHORTENED
         sie       se               ‘she, her, they, them’
         du        de               ‘you’
         es        s                ‘it’
         er        [ɐ]              ‘he’




12
     Rubach & Booij (1985: 317) suggest that nie is a prefix, but since it occurs nonselectively (e.g. nie
dzísiaj ‘not today’), it is a clitic on the current definition.
13
     Very rarely, a clitic may be part of the stress domain of a preceding word that is not its anchor: In
Chamicuro (ccc; Arawakan, Southern Maipuran), definite articles may be part of the stress domain of
the preceding verb, noun or demonstrative (e.g. anáʔ=na čmeṣ̌óna [this=DEF man] ‘this man’, Parker
1999: 554). This “backward-leaning” behaviour is similar to backward-welded proclitics which were
mentioned briefly in Section 4.1 above.


                                                                                                      27
Haspelmath                                                       Types of clitics in the world’s languages


This clitic type was called simple clitics by Zwicky (1977), and this term has become
very well known in the literature.14 However, it is not well-defined, so I prefer the
new term SHORTENED CLITIC, defined as in (61).


(61) Shortened clitic
         A shortened clitic is a clitic that has the same semanticosyntactic function as
         another form from which it appears to have been abbreviated and by which it
         can be replaced in the same position.


This notion does not seem to be particularly important in the world’s languages,
because such clitics are not common (see also Zingler 2020: 337–338). They have
been prominent in the literature primarily because English has several such pairs
where both a full form and a shortened form occur in the standard spelling.
      The great majority of clitics are length-invariant, i.e. they do not occur in pairs
such as (59)-(60). Of course, all languages have fast-speech phenomena, and variant
forms of function words are extremely common. But there is no good reason to
associate the shortened forms with clitichood, because the full counterparts of
shortened clitics are very often bound forms and thus clitics, too (as with the English
forms in (59)).15 And the existence of pairs of full forms and shortened forms does not
seem to be characteristic of clitics as opposed to affixes, because affixes often have
full and reduced variants, too (e.g. German genitive suffix -es or -s, Italian 3PL suffix
-on or -ono). Thus, the very notion of “simple clitics” seems to be primarily based on
the peculiarities of the English spelling.16




14
     It is sometimes said that the full forms are free forms (e.g. “Simple clitics are unaccented variants of
free morphemes”, Anderson 2005: 10), but this not the case for these English forms. The full forms are
non-deficient in that they contain a full vowel (not just a single consonant, or just a schwa), but they
are bound forms, too, like the reduced forms.
15
     It seems that person forms are different from function words in this regard: Independent person forms
can occur on their own and are not clitics, but when shortened person forms arise from these (like
German se and de), these are typically bound and are thus clitics.
16
     Some authors do not include the requirement that “simple clitics” must have full-form or free-form
counterparts, e.g. Halpern (1998: Section 1): “An unstressed word which is otherwise unexceptional is
known as a simple clitic, after Zwicky (1977)”. Given the general unclarity surrounding Zwicky’s terms,
it is surprising how popular they were for a few decades.


                                                                                                             28
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


5. Defining clitic


The present definition of clitic (repeated below from Section 1 above) is somewhat
unusual in that it has no direct antecedent in the literature. However, we will see in
this section that it accords well with the way the term has been used in the past.


(1)      Clitic
         A clitic is a bound morph that is neither an affix nor a root.


Everyone agrees that clitics are bound forms (incapable of occurring in isolation), and
nobody would suggest that a root (a morph denoting an object, an action or a
property) can be a clitic.17 It is also clear that a clitic stands in contrast with an affix,
as there are a large number of works that aim to distinguish between affixes and
clitics in a language (often following the lead of Zwicky & Pullum’s famous 1983
paper). There are thus mainly two points where one might want to opt for a
modification of the definition in (1), and one might question (62a) or (62b) (or both):


(62)


a.       clitics are monomorphic
b.       clitics are defined as not exhibiting word-class selectivity (= as non-affixal)


That a clitic is a single morph is not something that has often been said, but it is easy
to see that this is the case for the great majority of elements that have been called
clitics. Almost all question or negation particles, discourse particles, short adpositions,
subordinators and coordinators are monomorphic, and so are many person indexes.
It is true that auxiliaries and articles are not uncommonly multimorphic, as illustrated
in (63) by the Italian article le and the auxiliary hanno, which can be analyzed into
smaller constituent morphs (l- + -e, ha- + -nno).


(63) Italian (Indo-European, Italic)
         L-e        donn-e        ha-nno          lavorato.
         DEF-F.PL   woman-PL      AUX.PRF-3PL     worked
         ‘The women have worked.’

17
     Exceptionally, Chae (2020: 105) discusses “clitic nouns” in Korean (kor; Koreanic), but this way of
talking is very unusual. The elements he discusses are normally treated as derivational suffixes.


                                                                                                    29
Haspelmath                                               Types of clitics in the world’s languages


However, the constituent morphs of le and hanno can be treated as individual clitics,
so that l=e= and ha=nno= can be seen as clitic clusters. It is true that this is a
nontraditional way of describing these forms, but there does not seem to be a good
alternative. If a clitic could consist of a sequence of morphs (i.e. if there could be such
a thing as “a composite clitic”), then all clitic clusters could be composite clitics. Thus,
it is best to specify that clitics must be monomorphic by definition.
     The other somewhat nontraditional component of the definition is (62b), the lack
of word-class selectivity. This criterion (also called promiscuity for short) will be
discussed further below in Section 6.
     In addition to boundness (= non-independence) and nonselectivity, quite a few
authors mention phonological criteria, especially phonological dependence or
deficiency, as in (64).


(64)


a.     “[clitics:] grammatical elements which themselves bear no stress and which
       make up a phonological word with a host item (that bears stress) which the clitic
       either precedes (it is then a proclitic) or follows (an enclitic)” (Dixon 2007: 574)
b.     “The best way to define the special status of clitics is that in terms of prosodic
       deficiency: they are words in the morpho-syntactic sense, but not in the
       phonological sense.” (Booij 2012: 290)
c.     “The most prominent property of clitics is their deficiency. Most often this
       deficiency is attributed to the phonological status of clitics: clitics are defective
       in their phonological representation and therefore have to prosodically combine
       with an adjacent non-clitic word.” (Ionova 2020: 22)
d.     “Clitics are function words that lack independent stress.” (Pescarini 2021:
       Section 1.1)


But is such an additional phonological criterion necessary? As Anderson (2011: 4)
notes, phonological deficiency or dependence does not distinguish clitics from affixes:


       With relatively few exceptions, the affixes found within words as formal markers
       of derivational and inflectional structure also lack an autonomous organization
       into prosodic constituents at or above the level of the [p-word].




                                                                                                     30
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


Thus, the one criterion that clearly distinguishes clitics from affixes is the lack of
word-class selectivity (or promiscuity of attachment; Section 6). Even though linguists
often express the intuition that clitics are “phonologically attached” to their host
(resulting in the Greek term enklitikón ‘leaning’), this criterion would be significant
only if we already knew that clitics are words. If we could initially divide the types
of (non-phrasal) forms into affixes and words, as in (65), then the prosodic deficiency
of clitics would be relevant.


(65)




But in fact, clitics and affixes are very similar in that they are prosodically deficient,
and there is no simple phonological criterion distinguishing affixes from words. Thus,
the subdivision in (66) below is much more straightforward, as it is based on the
simple criterion of boundness (non-occurrence in isolation).


(66)




Note that in addition to being bound forms, affixes and clitics must be defined as
nonroot forms, because roots may be bound, too. For example, English requires an
article or a plural marker with count noun roots (e.g. A: What do you want to buy? B:
A book/Book-s/*Book), and it requires an object with many transitive verbs (e.g. A:




                                                                                       31
Haspelmath                                                   Types of clitics in the world’s languages


What will you do with it? B: Replace it/*Replace). Thus, many more roots are bound
forms than most English-speaking linguists seem to realize.18
     By specifying that a clitic is not a root in the definition in (1), we distinguish it
from simple nouns, verbs and adjectives without making reference to phonological
criteria. As the phonological criteria are complex and difficult to apply (see Section
7), this is a clear advantage of this definition.
     But the most important way in which the definition in (1) is superior to many other
views is that it relies on a small set of clear criteria that could easily be used in
textbooks. By contrast, the earlier literature has made reference to a wide range of
diagnostics, and the heterogeneity of the criteria is reflected in quotations such as
(67).


(67)


a.      “a serious problem which prevails in much of the work on clitics... is that there
        is no criterial definition, but rather a list of tendencies, general characteristics,
        and typical features...” (Klavans 1985: 116)
b.      “the various elements which are called clitics form a heterogeneous bunch, at
        least superficially, and exactly what is meant by “clitic” varies from study to
        study” (Halpern 1998: Section 1)
c.      “It is extremely difficult to come up with an explicit set of characteristics that
        may be used to identify clitics cross-linguistically, because the parameters
        involved vary from case to case” (Stebbins 2003: 385)


Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the earlier approaches (in the tradition of
Zwicky & Pullum 1983) is not that they are complex and that the criteria are
heterogeneous, but that they may not always point in the same direction and that
their application is often subjective (Haspelmath 2015: Section 3). Subjectiveness is
a frequent problem in linguistics when “test batteries” are applied and there is no
clear rule for how to proceed when the diagnostics do not all point in the same


18
     Traditionally, the term “bound root” has been applied especially to roots that occur only in
compounds, e.g. Mandarin Chinese -gōng ‘worker’, which only occurs in compounds such as mù-gōng
[wood-worker] ‘carpenter’ and diàn-gōng [electricity-worker] ‘electrician’ (Arcodia 2012: 91). English
roots such as book are often treated as “free morphemes” in textbooks, but by the criterion of
independent occurrence, they are not free.


                                                                                                         32
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


direction (Croft 2010: Section 2.10; Tallman 2020). This problem affects not only the
definition of clitic, but also the definition of the subtype special clitic, which is often
said to involve special syntax: “A special clitic is ... a “little word” whose syntax is not
assimilable to that of full words that might seem to be syntactically parallel”
(Anderson 2005: 79). But if there are no limits on the ways in which special clitics
might differ from full forms, then this definition cannot be applied objectively.
     Taylor (1995: 181) explicitly argues for “graded membership” in the categories
word, clitic and affix, but he provides no generally applicable method for measuring
degrees of wordhood, clitichood or affixhood. He may well be right that a modular
view of grammar (where morphology and syntax are two different modules) is
inappropriate, but this does not entail the conclusion that categories like word and
clitic must exist and must have a prototype structure. Maybe these concepts are
primarily tools used by linguists and play no role in speakers’ mental grammars. In
any event, unless we know exactly what someone means by an affix, a clitic, or word,
it is very difficult to evaluate their statements.


6. Lack of word-class selectivity


A crucial component of the definition in (1) is the lack of word-class selectivity of
clitics, because it is in this way that clitics differ from affixes, which are bound
nonroot morphs as well. That clitics contrast with affixes in this way is fairly widely
recognized, as is shown by the quotations in (68).


(68)


a.     “Clitics can exhibit a low degree of selection with respect to their hosts, while
       affixes exhibit a high degree of selection with respect to their stems.” (Zwicky &
       Pullum 1983: 503)
b.     “It is largely because of their freedom to attach to practically any part of speech
       that clitics are recognized as a special linguistic unit.” (Taylor 1995: 180)
c.     “[clitic:] a unit that is not a word in a prototypical sense, but with fewer
       selectional restrictions than a grammatical affix” (Hildebrandt 2015: Section 1)
d.     “an element is only considered a clitic if it has a non-selective distribution but
       is dependent on a host domain with respect to one or more parameters of
       phonological wordhood” (Zingler 2022: 9)


                                                                                         33
Haspelmath                                           Types of clitics in the world’s languages


In the literature, we also often read that clitics differ from (standard) affixes in that
they are associated with phrases rather than words; in fact, clitics are often called
“phrasal affixes” (e.g. Anderson 1992: Ch. 8). And as we saw in Section 3.4 above,
some clitics (called epiphrasal clitics) are clearly associated with nominal (or
adverbial) expressions, or with clauses, and they occur strictly on the periphery of
such phrases (e.g. English prepositions, or words for ‘also’ in many languages). These
elements are clitics and not affixes because the phrases that they occur with do not
always have the same kind of word at the periphery; for example, English prepositions
are epiphrasal clitics and not prefixes, because they can occur adjacent to nominal
modifiers, not only to nouns (as in (47a) above: to our house).
     The definition of clitics as nonroot bound forms that are not affixes has the
advantage that it does not rely on a notion of phrase, but only on the nature of adjacent
forms. While nominal (and adverbial) phrases may be easy to identify in most
languages, this is much less straightforward with verb phrases and all kinds of other
phrases. Moreover, not only clitics, but also many affixes have a phrasal distribution
in a certain sense: Tense affixes and case affixes occur on verbs and nouns,
respectively, but semantically and functionally they combine with (verb and noun)
phrases.
     Linguists often treat case affixes and adpositions together (as flags, Haspelmath
2019), and also tense affixes and tense clitics (as tense markers), because they do not
differ except in their position with respect to the noun or verb. And sometimes we
find minimal pairs which appear to show that clitics are not really different in nature
from affixes. For example, in Egyptian Arabic (arz; Afro-Asiatic, Semitic) prepositions
such as maʕa- ‘with’ are prefixes, as illustrated in (69).


(69) Egyptian Arabic (Afro-Asiatic, Semitic; Gary & Gamal-Eldin 1982: 63, 86)


a.     maʕa-    xaal-i
       with-    uncle-1SG
       ‘with my uncle’
b.     maʕa-    l-bint       di
       with-    DEF-girl     this
       ‘with this girl’




                                                                                                 34
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


They always occur immediately adjacent to the noun because all nominal modifiers
follow the noun, including demonstratives. By contrast, their Standard Arabic
counterparts are proclitics, because they occur before the demonstratives and these can
occur on their own (and are thus not prefixes), e.g. maʕa= haaðaa l-kitaab ‘with this book’.
      Similarly to Standard Arabic, the Bantu language Fwe has a preposition-like
connective proclitic (bo= or ye= in (70)) that can occur not only adjacent to nouns,
but also to prenominal demonstratives which are not prefixes (Gunnink 2022: 189).19


(70) Fwe (Atlantic-Congo, Volta-Congo; Gunnink 2022: 186, 189)


a.       bàntù         bò=kúmùnzì
         people        CONN=village

         ‘the people of the village’
b.       Èmísì        yè=cí          cìshámù         mùshámù.
         roots         CONN=this      tree             COP.medicine

         ‘The roots of this tree are medicine.’


Moving on to tense markers, an instructive pair of languages is Greek and Bulgarian.
The Modern Greek future-tense marker tha- seen in (71a) is a prefix, while the very
similar Bulgarian šte= in (71b) is a clitic. Its preverbal position is rigid, but it precedes
the clitic go, and so both must be proclitics. In Modern Greek, the spelling may suggest
that tha- is a clitic, too, but the Greek object indexes behave differently from
Bulgarian: They are always adjacent to the verb and are thus affixes, which means
that the future-tense marker tha- is a prefix (see also Joseph 2002).


(71)


a.       Modern Greek (Indo-European, Graeco-Phrygian)
         tha- to-              páro
         FUT      it           take.1SG
         ‘I will take it’


19
     In Japanese, the reason for treating postpositions as clitics rather than case suffixes is similarly subtle:
as Nakamura (2018: 249) notes, the phrasal clitic =dake ‘only’ may precede the clitic postpositions,
e.g. Hanako = dake = ga ‘only Hanako (NOM)’. See also Chae (2020: 39–40, 140) for a discussion of
the similar situation in Korean.


                                                                                                             35
Haspelmath                                                       Types of clitics in the world’s languages


b.       Bulgarian (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic)
         šte=      go= vzema
         FUT       it       take.1SG
         ‘I will take it’


The term nonselectivity, or the older term promiscuity, may suggest that clitics are
completely indifferent as to the words they are adjacent to, but this is not the case.
Clitics contrast with affixes, which must be class-selective (occur always with roots of
the same class), so any deviation from full class selectivity means that the element in
question must be a clitic rather than an affix. In Standard Arabic, prepositions can
only occur with nouns and demonstratives, so they are fairly choosy, but they are not
affixes. In some of the quotations in (68), the authors assume degrees of selectivity,
but a definition of a term like clitic must be clear-cut.20
      It should be noted that bound nonroot forms are affixes also when they are
“mobile” in that they may occur on either side of the root (Haspelmath 2021: 19).
This means that some class-selective elements which have often been regarded as
clitics because of their phonological properties are not clitics. For example, the
person-number indexes in Kugu Nganhcara (boldfaced in (72)) are verbal affixes
because they always occur next to the verb.


(72) Kugu Nganhcara (Pama-Nyungan, Paman; Klavans 1985: 104; Smith &
         Johnson 1985: 103–104)


a.       Nhila     pama-ng          nhingu           pukpe-wu         kuʔa wa:         (=)-ngu.
         DET.NOM man-ERG            DET.DAT          child-DAT        dog     give     3SG.DAT
         ‘The man gave the dog to the child.’
b.       Nhila     pama-ng          nhingu           pukpe-wu         kuʔa (=)ngu-              wa:.
         DET.NOM man-ERG            DET.DAT          child-DAT        dog     3SG.DAT           give
         ‘The man gave the dog to the child.’


20
     Peter Arkadiev (p.c.) has expressed the intuition that clitics are perhaps better characterized as being
completely nonselective, whereas affixes may be somewhat flexible with respect to word classes (e.g.
number suffixes attaching both to nouns and adjectives). This would be a logical alternative, but I think
that it is much easier to determine that a bound morph is fully selective (i.e. occurs only on one class)
than to determine that it is fully nonselective. As a result, the definition of clitic is fairly broad here,
including all bound nonroot morphs that are not fully selective.


                                                                                                             36
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


c.        Nhila    pama-ng         nhingku         kuʔa (=)ngku-            wa:.
         DET.NOM man-ERG           you.DAT         dog     2SG.DAT          give
         ‘The man gave a dog to you.’


They may occur postverbally (as in 72a) or preverbally (as in 72b-c), but they are
always verb-adjacent and thus count as affixes (specifically, they are ambifixes; see
Arkadiev & Lander 2020). The literature has often regarded them as clitics (Klavans
1985: Section 2.2; Cysouw 2005), and indeed they are phonologically peculiar in that
they have a phonotactic shape that excludes them from initial occurrence. In this
sense, one might say that a verbal affix such as ngku- (in 72c) leans onto the element
preceding it. But few clitics are restricted in this way, and alternations between
preverbal and postverbal position of person indexes may be conditioned by a variety
of factors (see (33) above for Bulgarian, and (87) below for Portuguese - por; Indo-
European, Italic).
      A language that is similar to Kugu Nganhcara in that its person indexes are most
often directly postverbal or preverbal is Persian, illustrated in (73) (example (73b) is
repeated from (4) above).


(73) Persian (Indo-European, Indo-Iranic; Samvelian & Tseng 2010: 215)


a.       Ru-ye     miz             gozâšt-im=aš
         on-EZ     table           put.PST-1PL.SBJ=3SG.OBJ
         ‘We put it on the table.’
b.       Ru-ye     miz     =aš             gozâšt-im.
         on-EZ     table =3SG.OBJ          put.PST-1PL.SBJ
         ‘We put it on the table.’


That these Persian forms are clitics (and not ambifixes as in Kugu Nganhcara) can be
seen in examples like (74b), where the preverbal element is extracted and fronted,
and the object clitic =aš must be fronted with it.21




21
     Here one might want to object that the verb is not kon ‘do’, but bâz ‘open’. Indeed, deciding which
part of the complex predicate bâz kardan [open do] ‘to open’ is the verb requires that we say
something in addition, but this is beyond the scope of the present discussion.


                                                                                                      37
Haspelmath                                            Types of clitics in the world’s languages


(74) Persian (Indo-European, Indo-Iranic; Samvelian & Tseng 2010: 221)


a.     Mi-xâh-i        fardâ         bâz=aš               bo-kon-i.
       IMPF-want-2SG   tomorrow      open=3SG.OBJ         SBJV-do-2SG

       ‘You want to open it tomorrow.’
b.     Bâz=aš          agar    mi-xâh-i           fardâ            bo-kon-i...
       open=3SG.OBJ if         IMPF-want-2SG      tomorrow         SBJV-do-2SG

       ‘If you want to open it tomorrow...’


Another question is how we treat person indexes that occur both on nouns and verbs.
For example, van Gijn & Zúñiga (2014: 154) note that “many languages of the
Americas, (part of) the verbal person markers are isomorphic with the nominal
(possessive) person markers. For some language analysts, this is reason to regard them
as clitics”, and they give the example in (75).


(75) Plains Cree (Algic, Algonquian-Blackfoot; Wolfart 1996: 412, 420)


a.     ni-wâpam-â-w
       1-see-DIR-3
       ‘I see him.’
b.     ni-sîsîp-im
       1-duck-POSS
       ‘my duck’


If the argument indexes and the person indexes were thought to be the same affixes
(i.e. to have the same meaning), then they would indeed be clitics. But if they are
semantically different (which seems more reasonable to say), then they are
homophonous sets of affixes.
     A reviewer observes that derivational affixes in European languages sometimes
occur on bases of different classes, e.g. English dis- in dis-honest (adjective), dis-order
(noun), and dis-avow (verb). Again, if these were treated as having the same meaning,
they would be clitics. This would be an unintuitive result, but such unexpected effects
at the fringes are often unavoidable.




                                                                                                  38
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


7. Phonological “deficiency” and “dependence”


As I noted in Section 5, is often said in the literature that clitics are “phonologically
deficient”, or “prosodically dependent” on an adjacent form, and introductory works
typically mention the etymology of the original Greek term enklitikón (‘element that
leans on another element’). However, there seem to be no proposals for characterizing
the phonological properties of clitics in such a way that they can be applied uniformly
to all languages, and for this reason, phonological properties play no role in the
definition in (1). It should also be noted that the notion bound that is part of the
definition is a purely syntactic notion; there is no such thing as phonological boundness.
In this section, I discuss a number of ways in which “deficiency” or “dependence”
have been characterized, and I explain briefly why these notions are not suitable for
defining clitics in a general way.


7.1. Unpronounceability


Clitics do not have independent stress, and it is for this reason that they are typically
thought to be in need of a “host” (Bonet 2019):


      One consequence of clitics being prosodically defective is that they cannot be the
      sole element of an utterance, for instance as an answer to some question; they
      need to always appear with a host.


But what exactly does “prosodically deficient (or defective)” mean? If it just means
that a clitic “cannot be the sole element of an utterance” (= that it is a bound form),
then Bonet’s statement is tautological.
   Now it is sometimes suggested that such elements are “unpronounceable” by
themselves: “In order to be pronounced, a formative (word, affix, etc.) needs to be
part of an accentual unit” (Halpern 1998: 101). However, stress (or accent) is an
abstract property that is very much dependent on the surrounding material. If a
monosyllabic morph is an utterance by itself (e.g. English here!, or yes), the question
of stress does not arise because a syllable can be unstressed only in relation to an
adjacent syllable. “Lack of stress” is thus not a property that can lead to
unpronounceability.




                                                                                           39
Haspelmath                                             Types of clitics in the world’s languages


  We sometimes observe that clitics are deficient in that they are subminimal, i.e.
they have fewer segments or moras than a minimal free form needs to have. Some
languages have nonsyllabic clitics, as seen in many cases above (e.g. Amharic =mm
in (24), English ’s, Italian l’ in (15b), Tagalog =ng in (41a)), and some clitics have
reduced or short vowels that are not sufficient for minimal free forms. Clitics with
schwa [ə] were seen above in (10) (German de, se). These clitics could be said to be
“unpronounceable in isolation”, but most clitics are not of this sort – clitics like those
in (76) are phonologically perfectly complete and just happen to require the syntactic
cooccurrence with another adjacent form.


(76) Russian:         li     polar question marker (ex. (2))
     Greek:           mas    1st person plural adpossessive index (ex. (57b))
     Tagalog:         siya   3rd person pronoun (ex. (5))
     German:          als    temporal subordinator (ex. (48a))


7.2. Stresslessness


Clitics are typically outside the stress domain of their anchor word (Section 4.2) and
stressless, and they are sometimes defined as elements that lack stress (e.g. by Dixon
2007; see (64)). But we saw earlier that stress-integrated clitics may carry stress (e.g.
Polish nié wiem ‘I do not know in Section 4.2), so some authors have added the
specification that clitics do not carry independent stress. However, even that is not
entirely true, as some languages have clitics that are inherently stressed, e.g. English
tóo and German admonitive já (see also Section 8):


(77) He found the house wonderful, and she liked it, tóo.


(78) Komm já          rechtzeitig    nach Hause!
     come     ADM     in.time        to     home
     ‘(I admonish you that) you come home in time!’


Such stressed particles are not usually called clitics in the literature, but they fall under
the definition in (1) as they are bound morphs and are not class-selective. They are
focus and discourse particles and thus fall in the semantic range of forms that are
often clitics. Similar reports of stressed clitics are occasionally found in the literature,



                                                                                                   40
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


e.g. Lowe (2014) on accented clitics in Vedic Sanskrit (san; Indo-European, Indo-
Iranic), and Aissen (2017) on a stressed deictic clitic in Tsotsil (tzo; Mayan, Core
Mayan).
      It should also be noted that not all languages have word stress or word accent, and
that it is not even clear how to define stress in such a way that the notion can be
applied to all languages (Hyman 2014). Stress or stresslessness is thus not suitable as
a general criterion for identifying clitics.


7.3. Phonological wordhood


Clitics are often discussed in the context of phonological words (or “prosodic words”;
see Hall 1999; Hildebrandt 2015), and it is often said that clitics “do not constitute
independent prosodic words, and lean on adjacent lexical heads to form prosodic
words” (Elordieta 2014: 19; see also Aikhenvald et al. 2020: 12). The term host is
usually used for the adjacent form on which a clitic leans.22
      However, there is a wide range of criteria that have been used to identify
phonological words, and it has been found that these criteria do not always give the
same results even within one language. For example, stress domains and vowel
harmony domains are different in Turkish (see (54) above), and in German, the
criteria of coordination deletability and vocalic minimality conflict in the case of the
diminutive suffix -chen (Hall 1999: 18). More generally, languages often show
conflicting criteria for phonological domains and wordhood (Bickel et al. 2009;
Tallman 2020). It should also be noted that phonological words are widely agreed to
be partially isomorphic with morphosyntactic words, but in the absence of any kind
of agreement on how to identify morphosyntactic words, it is quite impossible to
identify phonological words in general.23 Thus, the notion of phonological wordhood
cannot be said to be well-established, despite its relative popularity since the 1990s.

22
     The term host was first used by Zwicky (1977). Recall from Section 3.1 above that it is not always
clear which form a clitic is associated with prosodically, so in this paper, I use the term anchor for the
word that is adjacent to a proclitic or an enclitic.
23
     This problem is briefly mentioned by Newell et al. (2017: 2), though without drawing any conclusions
from it: “Phonologists can [...] give us some information about word domain. Phonology per se,
however, lacks a theory of how the ‘word’ comes to be, and phonologists generally look to
morphologists or syntacticians to derive this construct. The latter two groups, however, don’t know,
and are often content with the fact that phonologists, at least, can tell them that something is a word,
when it is.”


                                                                                                      41
Haspelmath                                                    Types of clitics in the world’s languages


     Moreover, even if it were clear how we identify phonological words, this would
not be sufficient to identify clitics, because clitics could be related to phonological
words in three different ways: (i) they could be integrated into the same phonological
word (ω) as their host; (ii) they could form a recursive phonological word that also
includes the host as an embedded phonological word; or (iii) they could be adjoined
to their host and form a phonological phrase (φ) with it. These three possibilities are
illustrated in (79)-(81). It should be noted that these are hypothetical descriptions,
and there is no consensus in the literature about any of these analyses.


(79) Integration: Dutch (Indo-European, Germanic; Booij 1996: 219)
        Jan       kocht           het     boek.
        (jɑn)ω    (kɔx-tət)ω              (buk)ω
        Jan       bought          the     book
        ‘Jan bought the book.’


(80) Recursive phonological word: English (Indo-European, Germanic; Selkirk 1995:
        458) (see also fn. 3)
        need      ’m
        ((nid)ω əm)ω
        ‘need him’


(81) Adjoined to host, forming a phonological phrase: Spanish (Indo-European, Italic;
        Elordieta 2014: 31)24
        leyé-ndo-te-la
        ((lejendo)ω tela)φ
        read-GER-2SG-3SG.F
        ‘reading it to you’


Quite similar options exist for affixes, which may be              COHERING     (integrated) or      NON-

COHERING       (adjoined; e.g. Dixon 2020; Raffelsiefen 2023), so phonological wordhood
does not seem to be helpful in distinguishing clitics from affixes. Moreover, the
motivations for these prosodic analyses are very diverse and cannot be easily



24
     We will see in Section 9 below that the Spanish object indexes are affixes, not clitics, but in the
literature on prosodic domains, they have often been treated as clitics.


                                                                                                          42
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


generalized across languages. Some authors have highlighted the special situation of
“backward-leaning” proclitics like Dutch het in het boek ‘the book’ in (79),25 and such
elements have even been called “enclitics” because of their phonological properties.
However, as these phonological properties are not uniform, they cannot be the basis
for the demarcation of clitics from affixes, or for the distinction between proclitics
and enclitics (as we already saw in Section 3.1 for segmental effects).
      Clitics and affixes are already distinguished from other forms by being neither free
forms nor roots, so it appears that their phonological properties are not needed to
single them out. Intuitively, many linguists feel that phonological dependence is part
of the nature of clitics, but as this notion is vague and cannot be applied without
many additional assumptions, it is better to rely on boundness and on the distinction
between roots and nonroots.26


8. Clitics as concrete forms (morphs)


In the definition proposed here, a clitic is a morph, i.e. a concrete continuous
segmental form. This means that there can be no zero clitics, that clitics cannot be
tonal or otherwise non-segmental (Section 8.1), and that morphs cannot occur inside
other morphs, so that there can be no intraclitics or endoclitics (Section 8.2).


8.1. There are no “tonal clitics” or “accentual clitics”


While suprasegmental effects such as stress and tone often show similarities with
grammatical forms, they are not forms themselves. Forms are continuous segment
sequences, which excludes the possibility of “tonal morphs” (Haspelmath 2020:
Section 4). This also means that there can be no tonal clitics, as has occasionally been
suggested (e.g. Van de Velde 2009). There cannot be accentual clitics either, as was
sometimes discussed for Tongan (ton; Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian; e.g.
Anderson 2005: 94–101). In this language, definiteness is marked by a stress shift to


25
     See Cysouw (2005) on “ditropic clitics” (“backward-leaning” proclitics and “forward-leaning”
enclitics), and Anderson (2005: Section 2.2) on “backward-leaning” proclitic determiners in Kwakwala
(kwk; Wakashan, Northern Wakashan).
26
     The absence of phonological definitional criteria makes it possible to state generalizations about the
phonological properties of clitics, e.g. that they are overwhelmingly stressless. This is not so by
definition, but it can be treated as a testable empirical claim.


                                                                                                       43
Haspelmath                                                      Types of clitics in the world’s languages


the final mora of the nominal, regardless of which word occurs at the end. This
accentual marking shares the property of nonselectivity with clitics, but it cannot be
a “processual special clitic” (Anderson 2005: 95) if a clitic is defined as a kind of
morph.27 Similarly, saying that “stress is a proclitic” in Modern Greek (van Oostendorp
2012) is not compatible with the definition of a clitic as a kind of morph.


8.2. There are no “intraclitics” or “endoclitics”


Some authors have suggested that languages may have intraclitics, i.e. clitics that
occur between two morphs of a word-form, or endoclitics, i.e. clitics that occur inside
a root, just as infixes are often thought of as affixes that occur inside a root. However,
if we adopt the definition of clitic in (1) and the definition of affix in Haspelmath
(2021), this is not possible. An affix cannot occur outside of a clitic (because affixes
by definition occur next to roots or affixes), and a root cannot be “broken up” by an
“infix” or an “endoclitic” (because roots by definition are segment sequences).
     An example of a Russian intraclitic might be the preposition v= in the reciprocal
construction in (82), and an example of an Andi intraclitic might be the additive
marker =lo in (83). The supposed morph-internal status is shown by the angle
brackets in -do‹lo›sːub.


(82) Russian (Indo-European, Balto-Slavic; Arkadiev 2016: 331)
         Oni       razočarovalis’          drug    v        drug-e.
         they      were.disappointed each in                other-LOC
         ‘They were disappointed by each other.’


(83) Andi (Nakh-Daghestanian, Daghestanian; Maisak 2021: 21)
         Men       ruʟ-do‹lo›sːub,         qwar-do‹lo›sːub.
         you       say-PROH‹ADD›           write-PROH‹ADD›
         ‘Neither talk, nor write!’




27
     One could imagine a definition of clitic that includes tonal or processual or other kinds of abstract
elements, but I would not know how to do this. Nonsegmental effects are based on certain
correspondences between two forms, which are often treated as operations or transformations, and they
cannot be readily compared with segmental forms.


                                                                                                            44
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


Arkadiev (2016) and Maisak (2021) regard these forms as intraclitics,28 but this is not
possible in the current conceptual framework. If the preposition v ‘in’ is not a prefix
but a proclitic (Arkadiev 2016: 327), then the first element drug in (82) cannot be a
prefix or compound member, but must be something else. Affixes cannot stand outside
a clitic, and compounds cannot have a clitic inside them either, by definition. This
means that the Andi additive marker =lo is an enclitic, and so is the element =s:ub
that follows it in (83). The gloss is thus [say-PROH1 =ADD= PROH2] rather than [say-
PROH‹ADD›], i.e.      there are two prohibitive markers (a suffix preceding the enclitic =lo,
and an enclitic following the enclitic).
     The best-known case of a supposed root-internal endoclitic has been reported from
Udi (another Nakh-Daghestanian language), for which Harris (2000, 2002) provides
extensive documentation and discussion. She regards bound person forms like =z=
in (84) as endoclitics because she treats verbs like a-...-q’- ‘receive’ as single roots
(aq’-).


(84) Udi (Nakh-Daghestanian, Daghestanian; Harris 2000: 598)
         Kayuz-ax          a-z-q’-e.
         letter-ACC        receivel-1SG-receive2-AOR
         ‘I received the letter.’


What is surely unusual about Udi is that there are quite a few short bipartite verbs
like a-q’- ‘receive’ (Harris lists 27 such verbs), but they must be treated as consisting
of two different morphs, and thus somewhat analogous to English bipartite verbs like
take part or make headway. The proper gloss of (84) is thus [receive1 =1SG= receive2-
AOR2],     showing that the person index is a clitic, preceded by the first morph of the
verbal expression and followed by its second morph.
     When I say here that the Udi endoclitics are not clitics, I am not making a
substantive claim. According to the definition in (1), these elements cannot be clitics,
because a clitic is a type of form, and root-internal segment sequences cannot be
forms. As I noted, this follows from the definition of a                 FORM   (Haspelmath 2020:
Section 4), and of a        ROOT:      a form is a sequence of segments that has a linguistic




28
     They actually call them “endoclitics” and do not make the distinction between intraclitics (between
two morphs) and endoclitics (inside a root) that I take from Plungian (2000).


                                                                                                    45
Haspelmath                                                    Types of clitics in the world’s languages


function,29 and a root is a minimal form that denotes an object, an action or property.
While one can imagine that a root could be “broken up” by some material that occurs
“inside” it, this would not be in line with the definition of a root as a kind of minimal
form. “Breaking up” a root is an abstract operation, similar to operations “deleting”
or “transforming” forms, or movement operations, or zero elements. Such abstract
operations and elements are often useful for language-particular analysis, but they
cannot be used in comparative concepts.30 For example, if we were to relax the definition
of a form as a sequence of segments, then all kinds of non-continuous sets of elements
could be said to constitute a single form (e.g. English take ... part). The continuity
requirement is thus crucial and fundamental to our general concepts of grammar.


9. Romance object “clitics” as affixes


So far in this paper, I have hardly touched upon object indexes in the Romance
languages, even though these kinds of elements are more prominent in the literature
on clitics than any other type. I left the discussion of these forms until the end because
they are not clitics, but affixes. Consider examples such as (85)-(88) (examples from
Spanish were cited above in (8) and (81)).


(85) French (Indo-European, Italic)
         Mon      frère           la       connaît.
         my       brother         her      knows
         ‘My brother knows her.’


(86) Italian (Indo-European, Italic; Monachesi 2005: 55)
         Martina te               lo       spedirà.
         Martina you.DAT          it.ACC send.FUT.3SG
         ‘Martina will send it to you.’



29
     Since a form is a sequence of segments, “circumfixes” and “circumclitics” cannot be types of forms.
One may talk about a “circumfixing construction” (one that includes a prefix and a suffix), or about a
“cicumcliticizing construction” (one with a proclitic and an enclitic occurring simultaneously), but
these constructions must contain two forms.
30
     The reason for this is that comparative concepts must be defined in the same way in all languages
(as noted in fn. 27). This is generally impossible for abstract operations. Languages can be readily
compared in terms of their forms, but not in terms of their abstract operations and elements.


                                                                                                          46
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


(87) (European) Portuguese (Indo-European, Italic; Luís & Kaiser 2016: 215, 217)


a.      Ontem chamou-me.
        yesterday        she.called-me
        ‘Yesterday she called me.’
b.      Porque me        chamou?
        why      me      she.called
        ‘Why did she call me?’


(88) Romanian (Indo-European, Italic; Monachesi 2005: 44)
        Mihai    nu-l            aşteaptă.
        Mihai    not-him         waits
        ‘Mihai doesn’t wait for him.’


These elements are not clitics according to the definition in (1) because they are
bound forms that always occur on the verb, whether preverbally or postverbally.31
That they are affixes rather than clitics is actually fairly widely accepted in the
literature (Miller & Sag 1997; Luís 2004; Monachesi 2005: Section 3.3; Bermúdez-
Otero & Payne 2011).
     Authors who argued for affixal status of the Romance object indexes have typically
adduced Zwicky & Pullum’s (1983) diagnostic symptoms, pointing out that they occur
in rigid clusters, that they sometimes show arbitrary gaps and idiosyncratic
phonological behaviour, and that they tend to disallow wide scope over coordination:


(89) French (Indo-European, Italic; Miller & Sag 1997: 7)
        *Pierre les      voit    et       écoute.        (OK: Pierre les voit et les écoute.)
        Pierre them sees         and      hears
        (‘Pierre sees and hears them.’)




31
     It may be unexpected to see mobile bound morphs treated as affixes, but mobile affixes are not
unprecedented (e.g. Bickel et al. 2007: 43; Ryan 2010; Jenks & Rose 2015). If elements which always
occur on the same type of root but show some mobility were not treated as affixes, this would have to
be specified in the definition of “affix”, and this definition would need to become still more complex
(see Haspelmath 2021: 19).


                                                                                                   47
Haspelmath                                                    Types of clitics in the world’s languages


In the present context, these additional properties of object indexes play no role,
because there is only one criterion of clitichood: nonselectivity. Rigid positions in
clusters are of course attested in clitics (see Section 3.5), and so is idiosyncratic
phonological behaviour (see Section 4.1). An arbitrary gap is also attested in the
English Genitive clitic (which does not occur after plural -s: the girls’(*s) party, Zwicky
1987), and wide scope in coordination is sometimes even attested with derivational
suffixes, so it can hardly be criterial for the clitic/affix distinction.32 However, by the
criterion of word-class selectivity, the object indexes are affixes, so the present
conclusion conforms to that reached by Miller & Sag and those following them.
     Of course, the Romance object indexes derive from personal pronouns whose
position was freer in earlier times, and in medieval texts, they were not always verb-
adjacent. Thus, this is a clear instance of a diachronic development from clitics to
affixes, and the peculiar distribution of postverbal and preverbal object indexes in
European Portuguese is a remnant of this earlier clitic stage. The situation in Modern
Greek is quite similar: As we saw in (71a) above, the object person indexes, which
have often been called clitics, are actually affixes.


10. Conclusion: clitics are not intermediate between words and affixes


We have seen a variety of different types of clitics in this paper, as well as a variety
of different properties that are found in clitics. I showed that they can all be subsumed
under the simple definition in (1) (a clitic is a bound morph that is neither an affix
nor a root), but I did not claim that this definition says anything deep about their
nature. It is merely a definition, after all. But it is simple and clear, and it has sharp
boundaries rather than merely specifying a canon or a prototype.
     The definition may seem to be broader than has often been implied, e.g. by
including adpositions and subordinators (Section 2.6-7), which have not often been
regarded as clitics. However, it is unclear why they should be excluded, and it may
be a historical accident that they did not become prominent in the literature on clitics.
The result is that most function words are clitics (Section 2.1), but only those that
cannot occur on their own (= that are bound forms). Closed-class function words



32
     Erdal (2007: 178) cites the following example from Turkish, where the “professional” suffix -cı has
scope over two nouns (i.e. allows “suspended affixation”): kum- ve çakıl-cı geldi [sand- and gravel-PROF
came] ‘the supplier of sand and gravel has come’. Nobody would suggest that it is a clitic.


                                                                                                          48
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


such as demonstratives, auxiliaries and response words (‘yes’) can often be used in
isolation and are therefore not clitics.
     Much work on clitics over the last few decades is motivated by the hope of
explaining the behaviour of (certain kinds of) clitics by appealing to certain kinds of
architectures or rule types, such as lexical vs. postlexical rules (e.g. Halpern 1995;
Anderson 2005). However, no particular proposal has been widely accepted, and it
appears that the possibilities of an architectural approach have been exhausted.
Prominent authors like Zwicky (1994) and Spencer & Luís (2012) have suggested that
clitic is no more than a name for a problem: a label for a range of linguistic expressions
that do not fit readily into other classes, not a name of a theoretical construct, and
not a name for a “unified class of phenomena” (Zwicky 1994: xiii).
     In this paper, by contrast, I do give a definition which by its nature singles out a
unified class of phenomena, and this allows the term clitic to be more than a name for
a problem: It is a comparative concept that helps us to compare languages with
respect to phenomena that we find interesting without talking past each other. But
since clitic is defined as a comparative concept, there is no claim that it carves out
part of the underlying reality of languages: Like other terms for comparative concepts,
it is a METHODOLOGICAL TOOL, not a “theoretical construct”. To the extent that the term
allows us to formulate testable claims about the world’s languages, and to the extent
that these claims are supported, we will have found valuable cross-linguistic
generalizations, but it may still be unclear how we can explain these generalizations.33
     In addition to the architectural approach, a popular view has been that clitics are
in some way intermediate between free words and affixes. Zwicky (1977: 1) initially
characterized them as “presenting analytic difficulties because they are neither clearly
independent words nor clearly affixes”, and Nevis (2000: 389) even suggested that a
form is a clitic “to the extent that it deviates from the accepted properties of affixes
or words”.34 But just as clitic is not more than a comparative concept with some

33
     I do not actually expect to find robust generalizations that crucially rely on the clitic vs. affix
distinction, but as we need to know what a clitic is in order to distinguish words from non-words (see
Haspelmath 2023), this definition is very important for all works that make claims about words. Again,
it may be that the most robust generalizations will eventually be shown to involve form classes other
than words, but the ‘word’ concept is so central to linguistics that it is good to have a clear definition
of it with sharp boundaries.
34
     In a non-serious mode, Sadock (1995: 260) suggested that a clitic could be defined as “an element
whose distribution linguists cannot comfortably consign to a single grammatical component”.




                                                                                                      49
Haspelmath                                            Types of clitics in the world’s languages


usefulness for linguists, the familiar affix vs. word distinction (and the morphology
vs. syntax division in grammar) could be largely based on the orthographic word. The
supposed “analytic difficulties” of clitics would then reflect the difficulties of deciding
how to write them (jointly, or separately, or with a hyphen or other boundary
symbol). The definition of affix is actually much more complex than the definition of
clitic (once a definition of affix is in place), as can be seen in Haspelmath (2021), and
defining word is not straightforward either (see Haspelmath 2023). But in whatever
way we end up defining these terms, the definitions are unlikely to give us deep
insights into their nature.
  Clitics could be “intermediate” between free words and affixes if there were a single
dimension along which they vary, a kind of “scale of coalescence”, or “tightness of
bonding”. It has often been suggested that there is such a continuous scale, with a
diachronic counterpart in grammaticalization (Hopper & Traugott 2003: 142):


(90) the coalescence scale
     free word > clitic > affix


But no systematic way of quantifying the degrees on a scale of coalescence or of
tightness of bonding has been suggested, and linguists have mostly relied on their
intuitions of what constitutes tight or loose attachment. In view of the great variety of
phenomena that have been cited as diagnostics, we cannot conclude that there is
sufficient evidence that the scale is real. Aikhenvald (2002: 42) says that applying a
wide range of criteria “suggests a scalar, or continuum-type approach – that is, some
morphemes turn out to be more affix-like and others to be more word-like”. But
Börjars & Harries (2008) have rightly emphasized that the different dimensions of
variation need not correlate with each other, and van Gijn & Zúñiga (2014: 155) make
this very concrete: They examine four such dimensions (phonological integration,
rigid position, syntactic weight, and lexical class) for twelve morph types from
different languages, and they do not find a clear clustering of the dimensions. There
is no reason to think that there is a single scale or continuum.
  There are thus many open questions that need to be addressed by future research,
but I hope that by providing simple and clear definitions of terms such as affix
(Haspelmath 2021) and clitic (definition (1) in Section 1), this research will be
facilitated. The definitions do not answer any theoretical questions, but it should have




                                                                                                  50
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


become clear that it is possible to have such definitions even without answers to our
broader questions.



Acknowledgements


For useful comments on an earlier version of this paper, I am particularly indebted to
Peter Arkadiev, Irenäus Kulik and Tim Zingler, but also to quite a few commentators
on Academia.edu. In addition, I thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors.


Abbreviations

 1 = 1st person                     DUR = durative           NONFUT   = non-future
 2 = 2 person
         nd
                                    ERG    = ergative        NONMASC = non-masculine

 3 = 3 person
         rd
                                    EMPH    = emphatic       OBJ   = object
 ADM = admonitive                   EXCL   = exclusive       PL   = plural
 ACC   = accusative                 EZ   = ezafe             POSS   = possessive
 ADD = additive                     F   = feminine           PQ   = polar question
 ALL = allative                     FOC    = focus           PRF   = perfect
 AOR=    aorist                     FUT = future             PROH   = prohibitive
 ART= article                       G4    = gender 4         PRS   = present
 AUX   = auxiliary                  GEN=     genitive        PST   = past
 AV   = actor voice                 GER    = gerund          PTCP   = participle
 COMP   = complementizer            HORT = hortative         QM    = question marker
 COMPL   = completive               IMPF =    imperfective   REFL   = reflexive
 CONJ = conjunction                 INCL   = inclusive       REL   = relative
 CONN = connective                  IND   = indicative       RES =   resultative
 COP=    copula                     INS   = instrumental     SBJ =   subject
 DAT = dative                       IRR = irrealis           SBJV =   subjunctive
 DECL   = declarative               LNK    = linker          SG   = singular
 DEF = definite                     LOC = locative           TOP =   topic
 DET = determiner                   M    = masculine         TR = transitive

 DIR = direct     Form              NEG    = negation
 DU = dual                          NOM    = nominative




                                                                                       51
Haspelmath                                          Types of clitics in the world’s languages


References


Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2002. Typological parameters of clitics, with special
  reference to Tariana. In R. M. W. Dixon & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds.), Word:
  A cross-linguistic typology, 42–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., R. M. W. Dixon & Nathan M. White. 2020. The essence of
  “word”. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, R. M. W. Dixon & Nathan M. White (eds.),
  Phonological word and grammatical word: A cross-linguistic typology, 1–24. Oxford:
  Oxford University Press.
Aissen, Judith. 2017. Special clitics and the right periphery in Tsotsil. In Claire
  Bowern, Laurence Horn & Raffaella Zanuttini (eds.), On looking into words (and
  beyond): Structures, relations, analyses, 235–262. Berlin: Language Science Press.
  (DOI:10.5281/zenodo.495449)
Allison, Sean. 2020. The notion of “word” in Makary Kotoko. In Alexandra Y.
  Aikhenvald, R. M. W. Dixon & Nathan M. White (eds.), Phonological word and
  grammatical word: A cross-linguistic typology, 260–284. Oxford: Oxford University
  Press.
Anderson, Stephen R. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge
  University Press.
Anderson, Stephen R. 2005. Aspects of the theory of clitics. New York: Oxford University
  Press.
Anderson, Stephen R. 2011. Clitics. In Marc Van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth
  Hume & Keren Rice (eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology. Wiley Online
  Library: Wiley. (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444335262.wbctp0084)
Arcodia, Giorgio F. 2012. Lexical derivation in Mandarin Chinese. Taipei: Crane.
Arkadiev, Peter M. & Yu A. Lander. 2020. Ambifiksy i drugie zveri [Амбификсы и
  другие звери] (Ambifixes and other beasts). In Andrej A. Kibrik, Ks. P. Semënova,
  D.V. Sičinava, Sergei G. Tatevosov, A. Ju. Urmančieva (eds.), VAProsy
  jazykoznanija: Megasbornik nanostatej, 35–42. Moskva: Buki Vedi.
Arkadiev, Peter M. 2016. K voprosu ob èndoklitikax v russkom jazyke [On endoclitics
  in Russian]. In Anton V. Zimmerling & Ekaterina A. Ljutikova (eds.), Arxitektura
  klauzy v parametričeskix modeljax: Sintaksis, informacionnaja struktura, porjadok slov,
  325–331. Moskva: Jazyki slavjanskix kul’tur.
Avgustinova, Tania. 1994. On Bulgarian verbal clitics. Journal of Slavic Linguistics
  2(1). 29–47.



                                                                                                52
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


Berghäll, Liisa. 2015. A grammar of Mauwake. Berlin: Language Science Press.
   (http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/67)
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo & John Payne. 2011. There are no special clitics. In
   Alexandra Galani, Glyn Hicks & George Tsoulas (eds.), Morphology and its interfaces,
   57–69. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bickel, Balthasar, Goma Banjade, Martin Gaenszle, Elena Lieven, Netra P. Paudyal,
   Ichchha P. Rai, Manoj Rai, Novel Kishore Rai & Sabine Stoll. 2007. Free prefix
   ordering in Chintang. Language 83(1). 43–73.
Bickel, Balthasar, Kristine Hildebrandt & René Schiering. 2009. The distribution of
   phonological word domains: A probabilistic typology. In Janet Grijzenhout & Barış
   Kabak (eds.), Phonological domains: Universals and deviations, 47–75. Berlin: Mouton
   de Gruyter.
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: H. Holt and Company.
Bonet, Eulalia. 2019. Clitics and clitic clusters in morphology. Oxford Research
   Encyclopedia of Linguistics. (doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.519)
Booij, Geert. 1996. Cliticization as prosodic integration: The case of Dutch. The
   Linguistic Review 13(3–4). 219–242. (doi:10.1515/tlir.1996.13.3-4.219)
Booij, Geert E. 2012. The grammar of words: An introduction to linguistic morphology
   (3rd edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Börjars, Kersti & Pauline Harries. 2008. The clitic-affix distinction, historical change,
   and Scandinavian bound definiteness marking. Journal of Germanic Linguistics
   20(4). 289–350. (doi:10.1017/S1470542708000068)
Bošković, Željko. 2016. Second-position clitics cross-linguistically. In Franc Lanko
   Marušič & Rok Žaucer (eds.), Formal studies in Slovenian Syntax: In honor of Janez
   Orešnik, 23–53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Boye, Kasper & Peter Harder. 2012. A usage-based theory of grammatical status and
   grammaticalization. Language 88(1). 1–44.
Chae, Hee-Rahk. 2020. Korean morphosyntax: Focusing on clitics and their roles in
   syntax. Abingdon: Routledge.
Croft, William. 2010. Ten unwarranted assumptions in syntactic argumentation. In
   Kasper Boye, & Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen (eds.), Language usage and language
   structure, 313–350. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cysouw, Michael. 2005. Morphology in the wrong place: A survey of preposed
   enclitics. In Wolfgang U. Dressler, Dieter Kastovsky, Oskar E. Pfeiffer & Rainer,




                                                                                      53
Haspelmath                                          Types of clitics in the world’s languages


  Franz (eds.), Morphology and its demarcations: Selected papers from the 11th
  Morphology Meeting, Vienna, February 2004, 17–37. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Demeke, Girma A. & Ronny Meyer. 2008. The enclitic -mm in Amharic: reassessment
  of     a     multifunctional      morpheme.       Linguistics       46(3).         607–628.
  (doi:10.1515/LING.2008.020)
Dixon, R. M. W. 2007. Clitics in English. English Studies 88(5). 574–600.
  (doi:10.1080/00138380701566102)
Dixon, R. M. W. 2020. Words within words: Examples from Yidiñ, Jarawara, and
  Fijian. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, R. M. W. Dixon & Nathan M. White (eds.),
  Phonological word and grammatical word: A cross-linguistic typology, 25–38. Oxford:
  Oxford University Press.
Dryer, Matthew S. 2005. Polar questions. In Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer,
  David Gil & Bernard Comrie (eds.), The world atlas of language structures, 470–473.
  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Elordieta, Gorka. 2014. The word in phonology. In Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano & José-
  Luis Mendívil-Giró (eds.), To be or not to be a word: New reflections on the definition
  of word, 6–65. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Erdal, Marcel. 2000. Clitics in Turkish. In Aslı Göksel & Celia Kerslake (eds.), Studies
  on Turkish and Turkic Languages: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on
  Turkish Linguistics, Lincoln College, Oxford, August 12-14, 1998, 41–48. Wiesbaden:
  Harrassowitz.
Erdal, Marcel. 2007. Group inflexion, morphological ellipsis, affix suspension, clitic
  sharing. In M.M. Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest (ed.), Combats pour les langues du monde:
  Hommage à Claude Hagège, 177–189. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Fattier, Dominique. 2013. Haitian Creole structure dataset. In Susanne Maria
  Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath & Magnus Huber (eds.), Atlas of
  Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for
  Evolutionary Anthropology. (https://apics-online.info/contributions/49)
Fehn, Anne-Maria. 2016. A grammar of Ts’ixa (Kalahari Khoe). Köln: Universität zu
  Köln. (Doctoral Dissertation.) (http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/7062/)
Fortescue, Michael. 1984. West Greenlandic. London: Croom Helm.
Gary, Judith Olmsted & Saad Gamal-Eldin. 1982. Cairene Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.
  Amsterdam: North Holland.
Gerdts, Donna B. & Adam Werle. 2014. Halkomelem clitic types. Morphology 24(3).
  245–281. (doi:10.1007/s11525-014-9241-0)



                                                                                                54
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


Göksel, Aslı & Celia Kerslake. 2005. Turkish: An essential grammar. London: Routledge.
Gunnink, Hilde. 2022. A grammar of Fwe. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Hall, Tracy A. 1999. The phonological word: A review. In Tracy A. Hall & Ursula
   Kleinhenz (eds.), Studies on the phonological word, 1–22. Amsterdam: John
   Benjamins.
Halpern, Aaron. 1995. On the placement and morphology of clitics. Stanford: CSLI
   Publications.
Halpern, Aaron. 1998. Clitics. In Andrew Spencer & Arnold M. Zwicky (eds.), The
   handbook of morphology, 101–122. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hannahs, S. J. & Maggie Tallerman. 2006. At the interface: Selection of the Welsh
   definite article. Linguistics 44(4). 781–816. (doi:10.1515/LING.2006.025)
Harris, Alice C. 2000. Where in the word Is the Udi clitic? Language 76(3). 593–616.
Harris, Alice C. 2002. Endoclitics and the origins of Udi morphosyntax. Oxford: Oxford
   University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2013. Argument indexing: A conceptual framework for the
   syntax of bound person forms. In Dik Bakker & Martin Haspelmath (eds.),
   Languages across boundaries: Studies in memory of Anna Siewierska, 197–226. Berlin:
   Mouton de Gruyter.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2015. Defining vs. diagnosing linguistic categories: A case study
   of clitic phenomena. In Joanna Błaszczak, Dorota Klimek-Jankowska & Krzysztof
   Migdalski (eds.), How categorical are categories? New approaches to the old questions
   of noun, verb, and adjective, 273–304. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2019. Indexing and flagging, and head and dependent marking.
   Te Reo 62(1). 93–115. (doi:10.17617/2.3168042)
Haspelmath, Martin. 2020. The morph as a minimal linguistic form. Morphology
   30(2). 117–134. (doi:10.1007/s11525-020-09355-5)
Haspelmath, Martin. 2021. Bound forms, welded forms, and affixes: Basic concepts
   for    morphological        comparison.        Voprosy      Jazykoznanija   2021(1).   7–28.
   (doi:10.31857/0373-658X.2021.1.7-28)
Haspelmath,        Martin.      2023.      Defining      the    word. WORD 69(3).     283–297.
   (doi:10.1080/00437956.2023.2237272)
Hildebrandt, Kristine A. 2015. The prosodic word. In John R. Taylor (ed.), The Oxford
   handbook of the word, 221–245. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2014. Asymmetries in the prosodic phrasing of function
   words: Another look at the suffixing preference. Language 90(4). 927–960.


                                                                                             55
Haspelmath                                         Types of clitics in the world’s languages


Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization: 2nd edition.
  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hosokawa, Komei. 1991. The Yawuru Language of West Kimberley. A Meaning-Based
  Description. Canberra: Australian National University.
Hyman, Larry M. 2014. Do all languages have word accent? In Harry Van der Hulst
  (ed.), Word Stress: Theoretical and typological issues, 56–82. Cambridge: Cambridge
  University Press.
Ionova, A. 2019. The unbearable lightness of clitics. Leiden: Leiden University-LOT.
  (Doctoral Dissertation.) (https://hdl.handle.net/1887/83258)
Jenks, Peter & Rose, Sharon. 2015. Mobile object markers in Moro: The role of tone.
  Language 91(2). 269–307. (doi:10.1353/lan.2015.0022)
Joseph, Brian D. 2002. Defining “word” in Modern Greek: A response to Philippaki-
  Warburton & Spyropoulos 1999. In Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds.), Yearbook
  of Morphology 2001, 87–114. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. (doi:10.1007/978-
  94-017-3726-5_3)
Kaufman, Daniel. 2010. The morphosyntax of Tagalog clitics: a typologically driven
  approach. Ithaca: Cornell University. (Doctoral Dissertation.)
Kayne, Richard S. 1975. French syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kazenin, Konstantin I. 2002. Focus in Daghestanian and word order typology.
  Linguistic Typology 6(3). 289–316. (doi:10.1515/lity.2003.002)
Klavans, Judith L. 1985. The independence of syntax and phonology in cliticization.
  Language 61(1). 95–120. (doi:10.2307/413422)
Konnerth, Linda. 2020. A grammar of Karbi. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lowe, John. 2014. Accented clitics in the Ṛgveda. Transactions of the Philological
  Society 112(1). 5–43. (doi:10.1111/1467-968X.12013)
Luís, Ana R. 2004. Clitics as morphology. Colchester: University of Essex. (Doctoral
  Dissertation.)
Luís, Ana R. & Georg A. Kaiser. 2016. Clitic pronouns: Phonology, morphology, and
  syntax. In W. Leo Wetzels, João Costa & Sergio Menuzzi (eds.), The Handbook of
  Portuguese       Linguistics,   210–233.   Wiley       Online        Library:         Wiley.
  (doi:10.1002/9781118791844.ch12)
Maisak, Timur. 2021. Endoclitics in Andi. Folia Linguistica 55(1). 1–34.
  (doi:10.1515/flin-2020-2069)




                                                                                               56
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


Miller, Philip H. & Ivan A. Sag. 1997. French clitic movement without clitics or
   movement.         Natural      Language       &       Linguistic    Theory    15(3).      573–639.
   (doi:10.1023/A:1005815413834)
Monachesi, Paola. 2005. The verbal complex in Romance: A case study in grammatical
   interfaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mushin, Ilana. 2012. A grammar of Garrwa. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Nakamura, Wataru. 2018. Case. In Yōko Hasegawa (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of
   Japanese linguistics, 249–275. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nevis, Joel A. 2000. Clitics. In Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann & Joachim Mugdan
   (eds.), Morphology: An international handbook on inflection and word-formation
   (Volume          1),         388–404.             Berlin:          Mouton      de         Gruyter.
   (https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110111286.1.5.360)
Newell, Heather, Máire Noonan, Glyne Piggott, & Lisa deMena Travis (eds.). 2017.
   The structure of words at the interfaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nida, Eugene A. 1946. Morphology: The descriptive analysis of words (1st edition). Ann
   Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Nordhoff, Sebastian. 2009. A grammar of Upcountry Sri Lanka Malay. Amsterdam:
   University of Amsterdam-LOT. (Doctoral Dissertation.)
Nordlinger, Rachel. 1998. A grammar of Wambaya, Northern Australia. Canberra:
   Pacific Linguistics. (http://dx.doi.org/10.15144/PL-C140)
Parker, Steve. 1999. On the behavior of definite articles in Chamicuro. Language
   75(3). 552–562. (doi:10.2307/417060)
Pescarini, Diego. 2021. Romance object clitics: Microvariation and linguistic change.
   Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plank, Frans. 2005. The prosodic contribution of clitics: Focus on Latin. Lingue e
   Linguaggio 4(2). 281–292. (doi:10.1418/20726)
Plungian, Vladimir A. 2000. Obščaja morfologiia: Vvedenie v problematiku. Moskva:
   URSS.
Raffelsiefen, Renate. 2023. Morpho-phonological asymmetries in affixation. In Peter
   Ackema, Sabrina Bendjaballah, Eulàlia Bonet & Antonio Fábregas (eds.), The Wiley
   Blackwell      companion        to    morphology.           Wiley    Online    Library:     Wiley.
   (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119693604.morphcom050)
Rubach, Jerzy & Booij, Geert E. 1985. A grid theory of stress in Polish. Lingua 66(4).
   281–320. (doi:10.1016/0024-3841(85)90032-4)




                                                                                                   57
Haspelmath                                          Types of clitics in the world’s languages


Ryan, Kevin M. 2010. Variable affix order: Grammar and learning. Language 86(4).
  758–791. (doi:10.1353/lan.2010.0032)
Sadock, Jerrold M. 1995. A multi-hierarchy view of clitics. Chicago Linguistic Society
  31(2). 258–279.
Samvelian, Pollet & Jesse Tseng. 2010. Persian object clitics and the syntax-
  morphology interface. In Stefan Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the 17th International
  Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Université Paris Diderot, Paris
  7, France, 212–232. Stanford: CSLI.
Samvelian, Pollet. 2007. A (phrasal) affix analysis of the Persian Ezafe. Journal of
  Linguistics 43(3). 605–645.
Schapper, Antoinette. 2022. A grammar of Bunaq. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Selkirk, Elisabeth O. 1995. The prosodic structure of function words. In Jill N.
  Beckman, Laura Walsh Dickey & Suzanne Urbanczyk (eds.), Papers in Optimality
  Theory, 439–469. Amherst: Graduate Linguistic Student Association (GLSA).
Smith, Ian & Steve Johnson. 1985. The syntax of clitic cross-referencing pronouns in
  Kugu Nganhcara. Anthropological Linguistics 27(1). 102–111.
Spencer, Andrew & Ana R. Luís. 2012. Clitics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stebbins, Tonya. 2003. On the status of intermediate form classes: Words, clitics, and
  affixes in Smalgyax (Coast Tsimshian). Linguistic Typology 7(3). 383–415.
  (doi:10.1515/lity.2003.019)
Stockwell, Robert P., Jean Donald Bowen & John Watson Martin. 1965. The
  grammatical structures of English and Spanish. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tallman, Adam J. R. 2020. Beyond grammatical and phonological words. Language
  and Linguistics Compass 14(2). e12364. (doi:10.1111/lnc3.12364)
Taylor, John R. 1995. Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory (2nd
  edition). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Toman, Jindřich. 1996. A note on clitics and prosody. In Aaron Halpern & Arnold M.
  Zwicky (eds.), Approaching second: Second position clitics and related phenomena,
  505–510. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Van de Velde, Mark. 2009. Eton tonology and morphosyntax: A holistic typological
  approach. In Patience L. Epps & Alexandre Arkhipov (eds.), New challenges in
  typology: Transcending the borders and refining the distinctions, 35–60. Berlin: Mouton
  de Gruyter.
van Gijn, Rik & Fernando Zúñiga. 2014. Word and the Americanist perspective.
  Morphology 24(3). 135–160. (doi:10.1007/s11525-014-9242-z)



                                                                                                58
Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads 3-2 (2023): 1-59


van Oostendorp, Marc. 2012. Stress as a proclitic in Modern Greek. Lingua 122(11).
   1165–1181. (doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2012.05.006)
Wackernagel, Jacob. 2020 [1892]. On a law of Indo-European word order. Berlin:
   Language Science Press. (Ed. Walkden, George & Sevdali, Christina & Macleod,
   Morgan.) (doi:10.5281/zenodo.3978908)
Walkden, George. 2020. Introduction. In George Walkden, Christina Sevdali &
   Morgan Macleod (eds.), Jacon Wackernagel’s “On a law of Indo-European word
   order,” 3–19. Berlin: Language Science Press. (doi:10.5281/zenodo.3978908)
Wolfart, H. Christoph. 1996. Sketch of Cree, an Algonquian Language. In Ives
   Goddard (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 17: Languages.
   Washington: Smithsonian Institute.
Zingler, Tim. 2020. Wordhood issues: Typology and grammaticalization. Albuquerque:
   University           of         New            Mexico.   (Doctoral   Dissertation.)
   (https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ling_etds/71)
Zingler, Tim. 2022. Clitics, anti-clitics, and weak words: Towards a typology of
   prosodic and syntagmatic dependence. Language and Linguistics Compass 16(5–6).
   e12453. (doi:10.1111/lnc3.12453)
Zúñiga, Fernando. 2014. (Anti-)cliticization in Mapudungun. Morphology 24(3). 161–
   175. (doi:10.1007/s11525-014-9244-x)
Zwicky, Arnold M. & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 1983. Cliticization vs. inflection: English
   n’t. Language 59(3). 502–513.
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1977. On clitics. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
   (doi:10.5281/zenodo.7436775)
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1987. Suppressing the Zs. Journal of Linguistics 23(1). 133–148.
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1994. What is a clitic? In Joel A. Nevis, Brian D. Joseph, Dieter
   Wanner & Arnold M. Zwicky (eds.), Clitics: a comprehensive bibliography 1892-1991,
   xii–xx. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.



CONTACT
martin_haspelmath@eva.mpg.de




                                                                                     59
