The Study of Clitics in Historical and Comparative Linguistics

Abstract

This paper addresses several problems connected with the study of clitics in historical and comparative linguistics. In (1) some of the problems connected with defining clitics accentually in pitch-accent languages will be discussed. Close juncture between full words is typical of Vedic Sanskrit, whereas in Ancient Greek there are only relics of this original contonational system, seen in the accentuation of the copula and the verb to 'say'. Clitics in Ancient Greek can be accented in certain circumstances by the operation of the general accentual rule. Two categorical indeterminacies regarding the status of clitics will be studied in some detail on the basis of data from Classical and Modern Indo-European languages. (It may be difficult to identify a certain element as a synsemantic word or as a clitic, on the one hand; and as a clitic or a grammatical morpheme, on the other hand). In (2) it will be shown that the degree of phonological cohesion between the clitic and its phonological host is complete to various degrees in the combination of the article + noun (Ancient Greek, Tiberian Hebrew and Classical Arabic will be considered). Other manifestations of phonological cohesion (segmental modifications, retroflexion in Sanskrit and vowel harmony in Turkish) will be brought into discussion. In (3) the accentual difference between enclisis and proclisis will be studied. It will be shown that Greek proclitics are without accentual influence on the main word (whereas enclitics may require the main word to carry a secondary accent), and that Turkish proclitics do not undergo vowel harmony whereas enclitics do.