Abstract

Clitics are prosodically deficient items which bear no lexical accent of their own and consequently need to lean on another accented element, the so-called host. The host and its clitics constitute a clitic group. Cross-linguistically, clitics belong to a small yet heterogeneous number of word classes: they are often pronouns, auxiliaries, copulas, determiners, adpositions, conjunctions or particles. Some of these cl…