(linguistics) A morpheme that functions like a word, but never appears as an independent word, instead being always attached to a following or preceding word (or, in some cases, within a surrounding word).
Used in a Sentence
clitics
Definition, parts of speech, synonyms, and sentence examples for clitics.
Editorial note
Ancient Greek clitics are traditionally separated with orthographic spaces (we know they're still clitics because they affect the placement of word accents).
Examples17
Definitions1
Parts of speech1
Quick take
(linguistics) A morpheme that functions like a word, but never appears as an independent word, instead being always attached to a following or preceding word (or, in some cases, within a surrounding word).
Meaning at a glance
The clearest senses and uses of clitics gathered in one view.
Definitions
Core meanings and parts of speech for clitics.
noun
(linguistics) A morpheme that functions like a word, but never appears as an independent word, instead being always attached to a following or preceding word (or, in some cases, within a surrounding word).
Example sentences
Ancient Greek clitics are traditionally separated with orthographic spaces (we know they're still clitics because they affect the placement of word accents).
Especially when the distinction between words and phonemes can seem rather arbitrary in a language full of clitics.
Well, Spanish marks subjects of verbs with inflection and requires detailed accounting of objects with pronouns and clitics.
Languages differ in whether clitics are written together with the words they attach to phonologically or not.
In Japanese, as in many other head-final languages, it is often hard to impossible to distinguish between clitics and suffixes.
In contrast, the Finnish case markers are bound phonologically and syntactically to a single word and so they are affixes, not clitics.
Finnish nouns can have stem changes, vowel harmony, 15 declensions, possessive endings, clitics similar to Japanese particles...
As to why Italian declines participles when clitics are involved, I assume it adds some redundancy so you can more easily guess what the clitic refers to.
That's including case, possessives and clitics, but you can also have compounding (eg.
Transitive verbs reflect the gender of the objects when using clitics, e.g.
However, clitics in general are not necessarily zero syllables long.
> Especially when the distinction between words and phonemes can seem rather arbitrary in a language full of clitics.
Quote examples
Latin clitics are written as part of the same word: "felis canisque" (="the cat and the dog", where -que means "and").
Certainly -ne and -que in Latin are not suffixes; they are clitics, exactly analogous to the English articles a(n) and the (not usually considered "prefixes").
To me, those would both be called "clitics", the term I know for a word which is phonologically dependent on another word while being grammatically independent.
A "clitic" in linguistics refers to an item which is (1) a word in the sense of having its own dictionary entry (which I might call "at the lexical level"), but (2) not a word at the phonological level -- clitics depend for their pronunciation on the word(s) (usually just one word) next to them.
Proper noun examples
Clitics are distinguished in that they modify phrases, not words.
Frequently asked questions
Short answers drawn from the clearest meanings and examples for this word.
How do you use clitics in a sentence?
Ancient Greek clitics are traditionally separated with orthographic spaces (we know they're still clitics because they affect the placement of word accents).
What does clitics mean?
(linguistics) A morpheme that functions like a word, but never appears as an independent word, instead being always attached to a following or preceding word (or, in some cases, within a surrounding word).
What part of speech is clitics?
clitics is commonly used as noun.