Skip to content
Home/ Clitics
Clitics

Clitics

by Spencer, Andrew
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780521864282

In most languages we find 'little words' which resemble a full word, but which cannot stand on their own. Instead they have to 'lean on' a neighbouring word, like the 'd, 've and unstressed 'em of Kim'd've helped'em ('Kim would have helped them'). These are clitics, and they are found in most of the world's languages. In English the clitic forms appear in the same place in the sentence that the full form of the word would appear in but in many languages clitics obey quite separate rules of placement. This book is the first introduction to clitics, providing a complete summary of their properties, their uses, the reasons why they are of interest to linguists and the various theoretical approaches that have been proposed for them. The book describes a whole host of clitic systems and presents data from over 100 languages.

About the author

Product details

Pub dateJul 12, 2012
ISBN-100521864283
ISBN-139780521864282
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2026-04-07 03:02
$101.43 $103.00 1% off
You save $1.57 · list price $103.00
In stock — ships in 24 hours with free tracking
Delivery by Thursday, October 1, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Linguistics - Morphology
See all
Syntactic Variation of Spanish Dialects
Oxford University Press
$71.63
Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus
Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus
$280.10
Pba 145 Deponency Ctb
Available
$127.35
Defective Paradigms
Available
$92.70
Periphrasis: The Role of Syntax and Morphology in Paradigms
<p>Periphrasis straddles the border between two major linguistic components, morphology and syntax. It describes a situation where a grammatical meaning, such as a tense, which could be expected to be expressed morphologically within a word, is instead expressed by a syntactic phrase. Inclusion of syntactic phrases in morphological paradigms creates analytical and theoretical problems that have yet to be resolved by linguists, who have been hampered by the rather narrow range of data available for consideration and by a lack of adequate theoretical devices. This book addresses the challenge by broadening the range of phenomena under discussion and presenting new theoretical approaches to the problem of periphrasis.</p><p>Part I takes four key languages from diverse families - Nakh-Daghestanian, Gunwinyguan (Australian), Uralic and Indo-European - as examples of languages in which periphrasis poses particular problems for current linguistic theories. Part II views periphrasis in different contexts, determining its place within the morphological and syntactic systems of the languages it is found in, its relations to other linguistic phenomena, and the typological variation represented by periphrastic constructions. Treating periphrasis as a morphological and syntactic phenomenon at the same time and applying the criteria worked out within the Canonical Typology approach allows linguists to view periphrasis as a family of phenomena within a typological space of syntactic constructions used to fulfil grammatical functions.</p>
$75.00
Dimensions of Linguistic Variation
Dimensions of Linguistic Variation
$99.00