Clitic and affix combinations

Clitic and affix combinations: Theoretical perspectives. Ed. by Lorie Heggie and Francisco Ordóñez. (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics today 74.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. viii, 388. ISBN 9781588116116. $210 (Hb).

Reviewed by Wolfgang Schulze, University of Munich

The question of the functional and syntactic distinctions between cliticization and affixation techniques has been a hotspot in descriptive, typological, and theoretical linguistics. This volume, which concentrates on the syntax of clitics (i.e. clitic ordering) rather than on issues of grammaticalization, is another important contribution to this field. Accordingly, a broad range of linguistic issues are addressed, integrating the areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. In all, roughly forty-four languages are taken into consideration, including Czech, French, Greek, Icelandic, Korean, Malecite-Passamaquoddy, Spanish, and Turkish. Although the authors do not share a common theoretical framework, a certain preference for formal (e.g. syntax-based) approaches can be observed.

The volume starts with a helpful introductory article, ‘Clitic ordering phenomena: The path to generalizations’ (1–29), by the editors, Lorie Heggie and Francisco Ordóñez, who opt for a syntax-oriented approach to the ordering of clitics and affixes.

Part 1, ‘Clitic sequences’, begins with Louis H. Desouvrey’s contribution ‘Romance clitic clusters: The case connection’ (33–79). Desouvrey’s feature-based approach argues that the obligatory contour principle (OCP) is responsible for the movement of certain clitics in Romance languages. In ‘Constraining optimality: Clitic sequences and feature geometry’ (81–102), David Heap applies a feature optimality analysis to account for variations in Spanish clitic chaining. In ‘The syntax of clitic climbing in Czech’ (103–40), Milan Rezac presents a formal approach to clitic climbing. Fabrice Nicol, ‘Romance clitic clusters: On diachronic changes and cross-linguistic contrasts’ (141–97), incorporates minimalism to account for the shift from accusative (ACC)-dative (DAT) to DAT-ACC ordering of personal clitics in Romance languages and their regional variants. Elena Anagnostopoulou’s ‘Strong and weak person restrictions: A feature checking analysis’ (199–235) also includes a discussion of inverse systems.

Part 2 turns to the problem of ‘Clitics vs. affixation’. In ‘Non-morphological determination of nominal affix order in Korean’ (239–82), James Hye Suk Yoon uses Korean data to argue that syntactic approaches to clitics are superior to lexicalist analyses, both conceptually and empirically. Adam Szczegielniak discusses ‘Clitic positions within the left periphery: Evidence for a phonological buffer’ (283–99) and suggests that a phonological buffer filters syntactic output. In ‘The wh/clitic-connection’ (301–14), Cedric Boeckx and Sandra Stjepanović analyze the symmetric behavior of clitics and wh-words in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croation. They argue in favor of highly abstract properties that unite disparate elements. In ‘Morphosyntax of two Turkish subject pronominal paradigms’ (315–41), Jeff Good and Alan C. L. Yu employ the head-driven phrase structure grammar approach to distinguish two types of agreement markers in Turkish, one (the k-paradigm) that represents affixes, while the other (the z-paradigm) is an instantiation of cliticization. This section is closed by Juan Uriagereka’s contribution ‘On the syntax of doubling’ (343–74), which relates clitic doubling in Spanish to features of inalienability.

In sum, this volume brings together several highly promising approaches to the world of clitics, some more novel than others. Unfortunately, the strong orientation towards formal syntactic models sets the book at risk of not being entirely accessible to followers of functional linguistics.