Modality on Pronouns

[Marianne Mithun]

Let's not overlook the distinction between affixes, which attach to words
of specific lexical categories, and clitics, which are in construction
grammatically with constituents. Clitics may ride on a particular word
phonologically simply because it appears at the beginning of a sentence,
for example. In some cases the word a clitic is riding on phonologically
may not even be part of the constituent in question.


Marianne Mithun


--On Friday, January 23, 2004 10:45 AM +0000 "Daniel L. Everett"
<dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK> wrote:

> I am posting this on behalf of Nigel Vincent:
>
>
> "Dan's posting looks to be more like inflections on
> pronouns rather than nouns. It reminds me of the
> analysis proposed by Julia Barron in a paper in
> 'Linguistics' 36 (1998) 223-251 in which she treated
> English contractions like "I'll", "she's" etc as
> inflected pronouns. Since some of the items that enter
> into such contractions are modals, that would also
> provide a source of modally inflected (pro)nominals.
> Nigel"