[Lingtyp] odd clitic behaviours

Sun Feb 20 10:13:27 UTC 2022

On 12/7/21 15:47, Đorđe Božović wrote:
> I have entertained a similar idea of a matrix-like continuum of clitic 
> properties, with no "core" property, and so with relative positions 
> rather than absolute ones, as a possible alternative to Martin's quest 
> for clear definitions for crosslinguistic comparison,

People who have followed this discussion on clitics might find the 
following volume empirically interesting

Clitics in the wild : Empirical studies on the microvariation of the 
pronominal, reflexive and verbal clitics in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian.

https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/339

This collective monograph is the first data-oriented, empirical in-depth 
study of the system of clitics on Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. It 
fills the gap between the theoretical and normative literature by 
including solid data on variation found in dialects and spoken language 
and obtained from massive Web Corpora and speakers’ acceptability 
judgements. The authors investigate three primary sources of variation: 
inventory, placement and morphonological processes. A separate part of 
the book is dedicated to the phenomenon of clitic climbing, the major 
challenge for any syntactic theory. The theory of complexity serves as 
the explanation for the very diverse constraints on clitic climbing 
established in the empirical studies. It allows to construct a series of 
hierarchies where the factors relevant for predicting clitic climbing 
interact with each other. Thus, the study pushes our understanding of 
clitics away from fine-grained descriptions and syntactic 
generalisations towards a probabilistic modelling of syntax.

Best wishes
Sebastian

  in my PhD on South
> Slavic and Balkan clitics, which was defended earlier this year. I 
> hesitate to mention it because the thesis is in my native 
> Serbo-Croatian, so it's definitely uninteresting for the majority of 
> subscribers to this list. But as it popped out, and just in case anyone 
> might read the language, here is the reference:
> 
> Božović, Đorđe. 2021. /Klitički niz u jezicima balkanskog areala/. PhD, 
> University of Belgrade.
> 
> Mind that it is not the best and ultimate thesis ever, too. It does need 
> a thorough re-writing, and maybe one day I'll write something along 
> those lines in English, too. However, in the end I decided to mention it 
> after all because it also includes examples of clitics in spoken 
> Slovene, which in some contexts may be stressed and even used in 
> absolute isolation, forming the whole utterance, similarly to what was 
> Alexander's question for Quechua in the original post; as well as 
> examples of clitics intervening between roots and affixes, and surfacing 
> as "mesoclitics", in Albanian. Both of these phenomena are extensively 
> discussed in other literature on clitics, too (and in other languages 
> but the Balkan ones, as well).
> 
> In addition, variations in the positioning of clitics in the presence vs 
> absence of a copular verb, which is also what Alexander was asking 
> about, are not unknown in the South Slavic clitic clusters as well, and 
> there is a huge and growing literature on this peculiar relationship 
> between South Slavic clitics and copulas/auxiliaries, mostly from the 
> formal grammar camp. Possibly of most interest here is the generative 
> typological work on Slavic and Germanic done by Krzysztof Migdalski.
> 
> I hope this helps!
> 
> Đorđe
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, 6 Dec 2021 at 22:47, Jess Tauber <tetrahedralpt at gmail.com 
> <mailto:tetrahedralpt at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Sounds like continually shifting prototypes, with slop in both
>     boundaries and core. Perhaps relative positions are more important
>     than absolute ones? Something like matrix mechanics?
> 
>     Jess Tauber
> 
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> 
>     On Mon, Dec 6, 2021 at 3:06 PM Martin Haspelmath
>     <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de <mailto:martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>>
>     wrote:
> 
>         Thanks, Arnold and Peter, for the interesting critical comments!
> 
>         I completely agree with Peter Arkadiev that "if linguistics is
>         to deal with complexity and diversity of linguistic structures,
>         its terminological apparatus cannot be simplistic" – yes, we
>         need a lot of terms for all this complexity, in fact far more
>         than most people make use of (which is why I keep proposing new
>         terms).
> 
>         But I do not fully agree with Arnold Zwicky that "Our job is to
>         discover what the relevant concepts are in the domain in
>         question and then to provide names for them" – we have tried
>         this, but it turns out that it doesn't work well for general
>         linguistics. Different languages have fairly different "relevant
>         concepts" (= language-particular categories), so the comparison
>         of languages requires a distinct set of comparative concepts.
>         For example, we cannot readily describe Arabic or Chinese with
>         concepts derived from Ancient Greek (such as "(en)clitic").
> 
>         De facto, however, linguists do use quite a few Latin-derived
>         (and Greek-derived) terms for (comparison of) languages from
>         around the world, i.e. as comparative concepts. What should we
>         take these terms (e.g. /accusative, plural, preterite,
>         imperative, affix, passive/) to mean? They have a fairly clear
>         meaning in Latin, but what do they mean *in general*?
> 
>         It does not seem to make sense to pose this as a research
>         question – we cannot study languages in order to find out what
>         "accusative" or "passive" means. We attach these labels to
>         languages around the world because we think that they are
>         generally understood, but often we are not particularly clear
>         about what that meaning is. We know what a stereotypical
>         "accusative" or a stereotypical "passive" (or a stereotypical
>         "clitic") is, but if there are no boundaries, we cannot decide
>         what to do in non-stereotypical cases (e.g. in the case of "odd
>         clitic behaviours" in Quechua, as studied by Alexander Rice).
> 
>         Though Peter Arkadiev says that "we do not need apparently
>         "precise" definitions which end up delimiting arbitrary classes
>         of things having nothing in common apart from the randomly
>         chosen property "defining" them", I do not see what the
>         alternative is – simply *avoiding* the use of tradional terms?
>         In practice, this will not happen, as people will continue to
>         talk about /accusative, plural, preterite, imperative, affix,
>         passive/, etc. So I think it's better to try to provide simple
>         and clear definitions that can be used in textbooks. (Often, of
>         course, language-particular classes will not map perfectly onto
>         these definitions, as is illustrated by Riccardo Giomi's example
>         of the Italian promiscuous diminutive /-icchi-/.)
> 
>         Arnold Zwicky says "What I'd like to avoid is disputes over
>         whether some element E in some language variety L is *really,
>         truly" a clitic", and indeed, we have too many such fruitless
>         disputes – I have a long list in my 2007 paper on
>         pre-established categories (https://zenodo.org/record/1133882
>         <https://zenodo.org/record/1133882>, §3.3). But why are such
>         disputes about "clitics" fruitless? I'd say it's because there
>         is no clear definition of "clitic", while at the same time, many
>         people *think* that there is some general concept (a building
>         block of UG?) behind this term. But this need not be the case:
>         "Clitic" may not be more than a term that has been handed down
>         to us by tradition (Ancient Greek grammar, and then Nida 1946,
>         which shortened "enclitic" to "clitic"). Since this term is an
>         accident of the history of linguistics, giving it an arbitrary
>         definition seems just the right step to me – in this way, its
>         arbitrariness becomes apparent to everyone. (If "clitic" is used
>         as an "umbrella term", by contrast, there is no way in which it
>         can be used for precise communication, and we might as well not
>         use it at all.)
> 
>         It would be great if it turned out that "properties not listed
>         in the definition are predictable from the ones that are" (as
>         Arnold notes), and in my 2015 paper on clitics (which was
>         greatly inspired by Arnold's work), I do discuss this issue (§7,
>         see https://zenodo.org/record/4550427
>         <https://zenodo.org/record/4550427>). But this is not necessary
>         – "clitic" is a commonly used technical term, and as such, it
>         should have a clear definition (or should not be used). Quite
>         generally, I do not think that vague and stereotype-based
>         "umbrella terms" are needed in science, though they are of
>         course ubiquitous in everyday language.
> 
>         Best wishes,
>         Martin
> 
>         P.S. I have more discussion of the general issues of
>         terminological precision in my 2021 paper:
>         https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005489
>         <https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005489>
> 
> 
>         Am 06.12.21 um 20:13 schrieb Arnold M. Zwicky:
>>>         On 06/12/2021 16:25, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
>>>>         Yes, Zwicky's 1994 idea that "clitic" is an "umbrella term" was adopted by Spencer & Luís (2012) – but this is not a CLAIM.
>>>>
>>>>         If the question is how to use a term, we make *terminological choices* – and my proposal was to make the choice that a clitic is defined as "a non-affix non-root bound form". This would give the term "clitic" a precise meaning (as a general-typological concept).
>>         This seems incomprehensively bizarre to me. Our job is to discover what the relevant concepts are in the domain in question and then to provide names for them (which could be more or less arbitrary, taken from familiar terms, created via metaphor, or whatever). But I'm baffled by your apparent position that history provides us with a term that has been more or less useful in the past, so our job is to arbitrarily assign it to one of the relevant concepts, with the consequence that this term is then *inapplicable* to -- inappropriately used for -- every one of the other relevant concepts.
>>
>>         If this is an (arbitrary) prescription about how the term should be used within the community of linguists (the relevant set of language users in ths case), it's just terrible -- guaranteed to sow confusion and misunderstanding. It's Humpty-Dumpty's "[a word] means justi what I choose [that is, what *I* choose] it to mean -- more more and no less". I, Arnold Zwicky, am free to declare that what "clitic" means is ''hoofed mammal', so that if you want to talk to me you have to use it that way too. (Actually, I use "ungulate" for that purpose, and some people use "hoofed mammal" and even more people, faced with the task of explaining the concept they're talking about, give an ostentive definition ending with the ominous "etc.".  But nobody's going to buy my insistence that these creatures taken together are called, technically, "clitics" and that the Tagalog second-position elements are *not* clitics.)
>>
>>         I coined the technical term "umbrella term" to provide some sort of continuity with the history of our field for terms like "clitic", covering an assortment of loosely similar concepts -- each of which deserves its own label.
>>
>>         Perhaps you mean to claim that all the things under the "clitic" umbrella are in a family-resemblance relationship with one another (like things under the "game" umbrella)  and that there are central members of the family -- clitics *par excellence*, as iit were. But that's an analysis designed for ordinary language, not technical language, so I'm not sure how the *cognitive* significance of centrality would carry over.
>>
>>         What I'd like to avoid is disputes over whether some element E in some language variety L is *really, truly" a clitic -- with reference to the Martin Haspelmath definition of what a clitic really, truly is.
>>
>>         Perhaps you want to claim that your choice of a definition is not arbitrary, not "merely terminological", but signals that the particular definition you have chosen is one for a concept that is empirically rich, in the sense that ("interesting") properties not listed in the definition are predictable from the ones that are. But you haven't actually claimed that.
>>
>>         I'm afraid that I'm going to have to stop here, with the comments above. At this point in my life I don't have the time for extended dialogue on *anything*, even if it might be fruitful.
>>
>>         Arnold
>>
>>         ******
>>         No, Martin, we do not need apparently "precise" definitions
>>         which end up delimiting arbitrary classes of things having
>>         nothing in common apart from the randomly chosen property
>>         "defining" them. I find this approach neither productive nor
>>         scientific. If linguistics is to deal with complexity and
>>         diversity of linguistic structures, its terminological
>>         apparatus cannot be as simplistic as that. I apologise for
>>         putting it so bluntly.
>>         Best wishes,
>>         Peter
> 
>         -- 
>         Martin Haspelmath
>         Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
>         Deutscher Platz 6
>         D-04103 Leipzig
>         https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/  <https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/>
> 
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