English

Noun

clitic ‎(plural clitics)

1. (linguistics) A morpheme that functions like a word, but never appears as an independent word, instead being always attached to a following or preceding word (or, in some cases, within a surrounding word).

   In English, the possessive -'s is a clitic.

   • 1997, Raffaella Zanuttini, Negation and Clausal Structure, Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax, page 29,

     In fact, even within the northern Italian dialects, subject clitics do not constitute a syntactically uniform class, as has been convincingly argued in Poletto's work.

   • 2006, Olga Mišeska Tomić, Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-Syntactic Features, page 242,

     In Macedonian, clitic-doubling is a fully-fledged phenomenon. The Macedonian Dat and Acc pronominal clitics, which originate in agreement phrases and move to preverbal position,¹⁰ where they cluster with other clausal clitics, are on their way to becoming mere case markers, which formally distinguish direct and indirect objects from subjects.

   • 2009, Philippe Prévost, The Acquisition of French, Language Acquisition and Language Disorders: 51, page 196,

     Here, we will see that they also have problems with overt pronouns, especially object clitics, whose emergence is more delayed than in typically developing children.

Hyponyms

• (linguistics): enclitic, endoclitic, mesoclitic, proclitic

Coordinate terms

• affix

Derived terms

• postclitic
• preclitic

Related terms

• enclisis
• endoclisis
• mesoclisis
• proclisis

Translations