A clitic is a morpheme which has some of the properties of an independent word and some properties of an affix. The word clitic comes from the Latin word for leaning and is related to words like incline. You can think of a clitic as a morpheme that leans on another word, which is called the host.

Clitics depend on a word that they are adjacent to. An enclitic leans on the word that comes before it, and so looks kind of like a suffix, while a proclitic leans on the word that comes after it, so looks kind of like a prefix.

According to the Leipzig glossing rules, you may indicate that a morpheme is a clitic by using an equal sign (=) instead of a hyphen (-), but this is an optional rule.

There are lots of different kinds of clitics. What unites them all is that they don’t behave quite like a word, and they don’t behave quite like an affix either. In this section, we will look at some examples of some of these different kinds of clitics.

Bound morphemes which modify an entire phrase

One group of morphemes that can be categorized as clitics are bound morphemes which modify an entire phrase. One example of this kind of clitic is genitive ‘s in English. As shown in example (1), genitive ‘s indicates possession. For example, in (1a), ‘s attaches to Sharon and indicates that the house belongs to Sharon.

Like an affix, ‘s cannot stand on its own—it is a bound morpheme. However, unlike an affix, it doesn’t modify just the word it attaches to; it modifies an entire phrase. This is shown in examples (1c)-(1e). In these three examples, ‘s attaches to the words shirt, grin, and marathon, respectively. However, these phrases do not mean that the house belongs to the shirt, the grin, or the marathon. In all three sentences, the house belongs to the sister, since sister is the head of the phrase. In other words, ‘s modifies the entire phrase it attaches to, not just the one word it attaches to.

Bound morphemes which attach to a word they do not modify

Another category of clitics are bound morphemes that attach to a word they do not modify. This is the behaviour of determiners in the language Nisg̱a’a. In Nisg̱a’a, determiners cliticize to the word that appears before them, even if they don’t belong to the same phrase. This is shown below in (2). The noun Mary takes the proper noun determiner =t, which encliticizes to the verb giba before Mary. Likewise, the noun hlgiikw ‘sister’ takes the common noun determiner =hl, which encliticizes to the word Mary before it.

(Tarpent 1987: 211-212, as cited in Forbes 2024)

Morphemes that occur in a different location than expected

Some morphemes are classified as clitics simply because they appear in a different location than expected. Object pronouns in Romance languages are often called clitics for this reason. Consider the French example below. The typical word order of French is subject-verb-object, as shown in (3a). The object, which is the entity that the event happens to, in this case la fille ‘the girl,’ appears after the verb when it is a full noun phrase. However, when the object is a pronoun, as in (3b), it appears before the verb instead.

Clitic pronouns in Romance languages have some very unique and well-known properties. For example, some Romance languages have a construction called clitic doubling where a noun phrase appears twice—both as a full noun phrase and as a clitic pronoun, as shown in (4). In this sentence, the indirect object is marked twice: once right before the verb as the pronoun le and once at the end of the sentence as the full noun phrase a Juan.

(Belloro 2007: 6)

Another unique property of clitic pronouns in some Romance languages is that they can undergo a process of clitic climbing. Clitic climbing is when a clitic moves from an embedded clause to the main clause, as shown in example (5). In the Catalan example in (5), the 2nd person singular clitic pronoun t’  semantically belongs in the embedded clause with the verb veure ‘see’. However, it shows up in the main clause attached to he vingut ‘have come,’ even though it has no semantic association with the event of coming.

(Solà 2002: 228)

Another special kind of clitic that appears in an unexpected position are called second-position clitics. These clitics always appear after the first word in their phrase, no matter what the word is. Some examples from Serbo-Croatian are shown in (6). In these examples, there is a string of three second-position clitics, smo ‘are’, mu ‘him’, and je ‘her.’ When there is a cluster of clitics like this, it is known as a clitic group. In sentence (6a), the clitic group appears after the subject pronoun mi ‘we’. In (6b), the subject is dropped, so the clitic group moves to appear after the verb predstavili ‘introduced’. Sentence (6c) is a question, so the clitic group appears after the question word zašto ‘why’. Regardless of what the first word of the sentence is, the clitic group always appears immediately after it, in second position.

(Bošković 2016: 28)

Words that cannot bear stress

Another reason a word might be considered a clitic is if it is prosodically deficient. Generally, this means that it does not usually bear stress. Many functional words, including English words such as the, a, and of might be considered clitics for these reasons.

Check yourself!

Consult the following data in answering the check yourself questions:

(McDaniels 2008, as cited in Bošković 2016: 35)

References and further resources

Academic sources

Belloro, Valeria. 2007. Spanish clitic doubling: A study of the syntax-pragmatics interface. PhD thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo.

Bonet, Eulalia. 2019. Clitics and clitic clusters in morphology. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. https://oxfordre.com/linguistics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-519

Bošković, Željko. 2016. On second position clitics crosslinguistically. In Formal studies in Slovenian syntax: In honor of Janez Orešnik, ed. Franc Lanko Marušič and Rok Žaucer. Amsterdam: John Bemjamins.  23-53.

Forbes, Clarissa. 2024. Tsimshianic. In The Languages and linguistics of Indigenous North America: A comprehensive guide, Volume 2, ed. Carmen Dagostino, Marianne Mithun, and Keren Rice. Walter de Gruyter. 985-1012.

Solà, Jaume. 2002. Clitic climbing and null subject languages. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 1: 225-255.