floating clitics

[Henning Andersen]

Dear Matthew,

Regarding the Polish case, a sharp distinction has to be made between
Polish clitics in general, which have followed Wackernagel's Law since
Common Slavic, and the Person&Number markers, which have been drifting into
verb-desinential position over the past 600 years or so.

Polish linguists have traditionally called the P&N markers desinences when
they follow the original participle form, but enclitics when they occur
elsewhere.

In an old paper of mine ("From auxiliary to desinence") I drew attention to
evidence that combinations of Participle + P&N marker underwent
univerbation (segmental and prosodic) already by the 1500's, although the
P&N markers continued to occur cliticized to other hosts to the left of the
verb. From this I inferred that the P&N markers have been interpreted as
desinences since that time, as far as the structure of the language is
concerned, and that their attested statistically gradual drift into
verb-desinential position in the intervening centuries merely demonstrates
the tenacity of the extremely conservative norms of the language (which are
abundantly documented in many other ways).

In other words, during this long transitional period the P&N markers have
not been "floating clitics", but desinences required or permitted to occur
in tmesis, with varying pragmatic and/or stylistic value, just as preverbs
occasionally occur in tmesis in ancient Indo-European languages.

Their status of desinences explains why they are never attached to hosts to
the right of the verb. Verb-desinential position has been their unmarked
location for centuries. All deviations from this position have been
intermediate between this and their original, Wackernagel position.

The paper is in Martin Harris and Paolo Ramat, The Historical Development
of Auxiliaries, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 1987. The data are utilized for a
different purpose in "The structure of drift", Historical Linguistics 1987,
ed. H. Andersen & Konrad Koerner, A'dam: Benjamins 1990.

Best,

H

>One example that I am aware of is discussed by Spencer (1991: 369 - 374),
>what he calls "auxiliary formatives" in Polish which code person, number,
>and gender of the subject and which can attach to various clausal

Gender is not coded by the clitics, but by their (originally) participial hosts

>constituents, but not to the negative particle or to prepositions, and not
>to constituents that follow the verb.  A second example is an emphatic

It has always been a mystery why the Polish P&N markers would not occur to
the right of the verb. If their position was pragmatically conditioned,
then why this constraint? The proposed interpretation suggests

>clitic in Kannada (Sridhar 1990: 257), which encliticizes to any of
>various constituents.
>
>I would argue that these two examples represent two types.  In the Kannada
>case, the emphatic clitic attaches to a host with which its meaning is
>being associated, and the nature of emphasis (or focus) is such that
>various different sorts of constituents could be emphasized.  In the
>Polish case, however, it is not clear what determines what the clitic
>attaches to and there does not seem to be any sense in which the meaning
>of the clitic is specifically associated with the constituent to which it
>attaches.
>
>I believe that I have seen various other instances of clitics like the
>Kannada one, where the meaning is some sort of focus, such as an
>interrogative morpheme, where the position of the interrogative morpheme
>is a function of the focus of the question.  But I am primarily interested
>in examples like the Polish case, where there is no apparent natural
>connection between the meaning of the clitic and the particular host.
>
>My question overlaps with Rachel Nordlinger's recent query about
>tense/aspect morphemes on nouns, since clitics of the sort that I am
>looking for that code tense/aspect would count as one type of tense/aspect
>marking on nouns.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Matthew Dryer
>dryer at acsu.buffalo.edu

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