3.1.3 Cliticization

Recall that a clitic is a unit whose status lies in between that of an affix and a word. The phonological behavior of clitics is like affixes; they tend to be short and unaccented (we will talk more about phonology in Ch. 8). Their syntactic behavior is more like words, often acting as pronouns, articles, conjunctions, or verbs. Clitics preceding a word are called proclitics, while those following are enclitics.

English clitics include these auxiliary verbal forms:

Note that the clitics in English are ambiguous; Thus she's can mean she is or she has. Except for a few such ambiguities, however, correctly segmenting off clitics in English is simplified by the presence of the apostrophe. Clitics can be harder to parse in other languages. In Arabic and Hebrew, for example, the definite article (the; Al in Arabic, ha in Hebrew) is cliticized on to the front of nouns. It must be segmented off in order to do part-of-speech tagging, parsing, or other tasks. Other Arabic proclitics include prepositions like b 'by/with', and conjunctions like w 'and'. Arabic also has enclitics marking certain pronouns. For example the word and by their virtues has clitics meaning and, by, and their, a stem virtue, and a plural affix. Note that since Arabic is read right to left, these would actually appear ordered from right to left in an Arabic word.