<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>Dear Martin, dear all,</div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>
<br>
(...) our "intuitions" about clitics
can have no direct role in our science. We need clear terms, and
clear claims, and reproducible methods for testing our claims –
intuitions are often based on traditional stereotypes and can be
left to wither away.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I emphatically agree on this: we need to be bold and open-minded in working out new, sounder definitions, and to not let "traditional stereotypes" constrain our reasoning.</div><div><br></div><div>On the other hand, the point I was trying to make is that I am concerned with <i>the implications </i>of a definition of the clitic/affix distinction that takes promiscuity or lack thereof as the crucial criterion: if It. <i>-icchi- </i>or Portuguese <i>-isc-</i> are clitics because they are promiscuous, then what are the consequences for our analysis of the inflectional endings that come to their right? These are not promiscuous (I am ignoring the issue of nominal/ajectival number and gender endings here) so they should be affixes; but on the other hand they are separated from the root by an element that on Martin's approach should be a clitic. So, one implication of this approach is that we should now assume that clitics can intervene between roots and affixes -- thus, another quite huge turnaround in grammatical categorization that would require thoughtful examination.</div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>R<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>
<br><br>
<br>
<div>Am 06.12.21 um 15:06 schrieb Arnold M.
Zwicky:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre>I realize that this paper is now antique, but I continue to cling to its main claim, that CLITIC is merely an umbrella term and that (with the possible exception of two special cases, quite different from one another, and deserving technical terms of their own) the phenomena customarily referred to by that name do not constitute a single entity of theoretical interest:
AMZ, “What is a clitic?” (in Nevis, Joseph, Wanner, & Zwicky, Clitics Bibliography, 1994).
<a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky/what-is-a-clitic.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky/what-is-a-clitic.pdf</a>
arnold (zwicky)
_______________________________________________
</pre>
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>Dear Alex & all,</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I cannot help joining this discussion as the topic is
extremely interesting and very controversial.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Here I would like to mostly reply to Martin. For a while,
after having read your whole series of articles on the
issue, I have found your definition of clitics very useful
and the least controversial, and I have used it myself in my
own work. However, recently, I have realized that it is not
completely unproblematic either. Here are a couple of
controversies, which are mostly related to the notion of
promiscuous attachment.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>(a) Let's say that "attaches to" means "immediately
precedes or follows". But then if we take, say, the European
prepositions, in many cases this is true that they "attach"
to words of different syntactic classes. Say, in "in sum" in
attaches to a noun "sum", "in a house" it attaches to the
indefinite article, and "in these beautiful houses" it
attaches to a deictic element, and then an adjective follows
as well. However, the set of elements<i> in</i> is able to
attach to is limited to what constitutes the English noun
phrase (it cannot attach to verbs or adverbs). Therefore, <i>in</i>
always attaches to the English noun phrase from the left, no
matter what constitutes it. Therefore, it is kind of
"promiscuous" in your strict sense, but it is not
promiscuous on a higher level, therefore it is also a kind
of a prefix. This made many linguists talk of "phrasal
affixes", which makes sense after all. Moreover, if we take
a language in which a noun obligatorily occupies the first
slot in the noun phrase such a Hebrew (if we ignore the
article), then it turns out that its prepositions are not
promiscuous, whereas those of English are, which is very
counterintuitive, I would say. Rather, it would be more
intuitive to say that in both Hebrew and English
prepositions attach to the noun phrase from the left, but
the orders of elements within their noun phrases are
different.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>(b) One can look even closer at the elements whose
attachment is promiscuous, but whose promiscuity is very
limited. For example, adjectives and nouns are definitely
different word classes in Latin. However, they share a large
part of their inflectional endings. Indeed, we have <i>lup-us
bon-us</i> 'wolf-nom.sg.m good-nom.sg.m' and <i>lup-a
bon-a</i> 'wolf-nom.sg.f good-nom.sg.f'. Then it turns out
that according to your definition, the inflectional endings
of Latin are to be treated as clitics in cross-linguistic
studies. Is this a good solution?</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I still believe that with your definition, we are on the
right path, but maybe we need some more specifications.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Best,</div>
<div>Vadimir (Panov)<br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
<pre cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
<a href="https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/" target="_blank">https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/</a></pre>
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