[Lingtyp] Morphologically complex clitics?

Mon Apr 5 11:19:27 UTC 2021

Dear Florian *inter alia,*

It's never really clear to me whether with questions like these, we are
asking:

1. Are there descriptions which posit such things (i.e. use a
terminological framework that allow them to "exist" and then describe them
as "existing")?

2. Is there a thing like this in the language (regardless of the
terminological framework because all of the relevant notions have obvious
cross-linguistically applicable diagnostics / criteria)?

For 1, note that for some authors (like Stephen Anderson, circa 2005)
morphologically complex clitics seem to be logically impossible. Clitics
are either syntactic elements that integrate into (post-lexical)
phonological structure (simple/phonological clitics) or else they are
morphological elements themselves that operate over phrases. Since they are
supposed to be realizational elements themselves, it's hard to even imagine
a morphologically complex clitic being something that's allowed.

*Is Anderson making an empirical claim about the absence of morphologically
complex clitics cross-linguistically?* I don't think so. They are just
ruled out on terminological / theoretical grounds. I assume the Luganda
case would just be analyzed as a string of clitics - where their place in
the grammar would be (as post-lexical phonological integration or
post-lexical /phrase level placement or both) determined, would then depend
on what you meant by "normal syntax".

In terms of 'phonologically leaning' ... according to which phonological
process (if any)? You can always vacuously phonologically lean into an
utterance/intonational phrase. In much prosodic phonology, an element can
be categorized,tautologically as phonologically leaning just because it
surfaces at all (it would integrate into an intonational phrase (that need
only be identified by pause breaks), or an empirically vacuous layer of the
prosodic hierarchy). So for some linguists, this just isn't a meaningful
empirical question at all. Not that it's not interesting, we just have to
know a lot more about how one goes about establishing the bridging
principles between notions like g-word and p-word and the actual language
data.

If the question is - *can *such structural classifications exist. Well,
yeah. You just have to choose definitions of '=' and '-' such that a
morphologically complex clitic falls out. For instance, in Chacobo there's
this punctual morpheme *=/-tápi. *It allows some variable ordering with
"suffixes" and "clitics" in the verb complex - it could be categorized as
either an affix or clitic depending on what criteria you use. When the verb
complex occurs with an associated motion morpheme, *=/-tapi *happens to
have a fixed position after the AM morpheme and it happens to modify the
motion action. *SO*, just choose a definition of g-word that makes *-tapi *an
affix and the AM morphemes simple clitics. And voilà, you have a
morphologically complex clitic. Is this an example of a morphologically
complex clitic? If you want it to be, yes.

Thus, it's hard to know how 2 is being addressed in any of the discussions,
because '=' and '-' are not defined. So implicitly people are responding to
1. Which is fine, it's always informative to know how much terminological
variation there is in the field, but it's harder to interpret what it all
means.

best,

Adam

On Wed, Mar 31, 2021 at 10:14 PM Martin Haspelmath <
martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de> wrote:

> But what exactly is "a clitic word"?
>
> In Luganda, it may be uncontroversial that there are two words in
> *e-bi-déé=by-a-nge*  'my cups', because *by-aa-* also occurs as a
> proclitic elsewhere.
>
> But in Quechua *wasi-bi-chu-ga-n* 'is not at home', how do we know that
> there is a "clitic word" *-chu* and a "clitic word" *-ga-n*, rather than
> three clitics *=chu*, *=ga*, and *=n*? Is this because *-ga-* looks like
> a "verb stem", and we have the idea that verbs are "inflected"?
>
> Since Schiering et al. (2010) (doi:10.1017/S0022226710000216), it has been
> widely known that "p-(rosodic) word" is not a generally applicable notion,
> which casts even more doubt on the notion of "clitic word".
>
> But if we consider items that are traditionally considered "clitics" in
> European languages, it's really easy to find complex ones among the bound
> person forms, e.g. French *l-e/l-a/l-es*, Italian *m-i/t-i/s-i*, Greek
> *to-n/ti-n/tu-s/t-u/ti-s*, Bulgarian *n-i/v-i/g-i*.
>
> Martin
>
> Am 31.03.21 um 05:56 schrieb Larry M. HYMAN:
>
> Hi Florian,
>
> I was expecting lots of offers over the past 16 hours, but none! In Bantu
> this is quite usual because clitics often combine noun class agreement with
> whatever the marker is--often fused. E.g. in Luganda the locative enclitic
> =kô 'on it, a little' consists of class 17 ku- and -o. The "connective"
> (associative, genitive) prefixes the noun class agreement to /-a/ (ebitabo
> byaa=Walúsimbi  'Walusimbi's books', from class 8 /bi-a/), and so forth.
> Several of the possessive pronoun enclitics are bisyllabic, e.g. class 8
> byange = /bi-a-nge/ 'my', as in e-bi-déé =by-a-nge  'my cups' (where the
> enclitic saves the length of the root -déé 'bell(s)' from undergoing final
> vowel shortening.
>
> There are lots of such examples in the following paper:
>
> Hyman, Larry M. & Francis X. Katamba. 1990. Final vowel shortening in
> Luganda. *Studies in African Linguistics *21.1-59, available here:
>
> https://journals.flvc.org/sal/article/view/107438/102758
>
> Best, Larry
>
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 4:36 AM <florian.matter at isw.unibe.ch> wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I am looking for examples of morphologically complex clitics — i.e.,
>> g-words that a) do not form their own p-words and b) consist of multiple
>> morphemes. Below are some of the few examples I have found. In (1-2), it is
>> an encliticized copula which carries person inflection. In (3), the verb
>> complex consists of a finite verb, a converb, and an auxiliary, each their
>> own g-word. Both the finite verb and the auxiliary are inflected for first
>> person and therefore morphologically complex.
>>
>> (1) Trió (Cariban)
>>     əmamina-nə=pəə*=w-a-e*
>>     play-INF=occ.with=1Sa-be-NPST.CERT
>>     'I am playing' (Meira 1999: 180)
>>
>> (2) Ecuadorian Quechua
>>     paj  mana wasi-bi=t͡ʃu*=ga-n*
>>     3PRO NEG  house-LOC=NEG=be-3
>>     'S/he is not at home.' (Muysken 2010: 197)
>>
>> (3) Nangikurrunggurr (Southern Daly)
>>     jawul karicinmade *ŋebem=*wuɹic*=ŋiɹim*                catma
>>     spear bent        1SG.S.bash.PRS=fix=1SG.S.sit.PRS straight
>>     'I'm sitting straightening this bent spear.' (Reid 2003: 114)
>>
>> I am grateful for any further examples of such patterns, or references to
>> literature on morphologically complex clitics.
>>
>> Best,
>> Florian
>>
>> _____________________________
>>
>> Universität Bern
>>
>> Institut für Sprachwissenschaft
>>
>> Florian Matter
>>
>>
>>
>> Länggassstrasse 49
>>
>> CH-3012 Bern
>>
>> Tel. +41 31 631 37 54
>>
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>>
>> *florian.matter at isw.unibe.ch <florian.matter at isw.unibe.ch>*
>>
>> *http://www.isw.unibe.ch <http://www.isw.unibe.ch/>*
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>
>
> --
> Larry M. Hyman, Professor of Linguistics & Executive Director,
> France-Berkeley Fund
> Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
> https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing listLingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.orghttp://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
>
> --
> Martin Haspelmath
> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
> Deutscher Platz 6
> D-04103 Leipzighttps://www.shh.mpg.de/employees/42385/25522
>
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-- 
Adam J.R. Tallman
Post-doctoral Researcher
Friedrich Schiller Universität
Department of English Studies
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