Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That’s the kind of episode it’s – clitics
Here’s a completely normal and unremarkable sentence. Let’s imagine we have two different coloured pens, and we’re going to circle the words in red and the affixes, that’s prefixes and suffixes, in blue.
“Later today, I’ll know if I hafta get some prizes for Helen of Troy’s competition, or if it isn’t necessary.”
Some of these are pretty straightforward. “Some”? Word. The -s on “prizes”? Affix. But some of them, “I’ll”, “hafta”, “Helen of Troy’s”, “isn’t”....hmmm.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a small bit of language that’s sort of a halfway point between a standalone word and a fully glommed-on affix: the clitic! We talk about why sentences like “That’s the kind of linguist I’m” feel so strange and how on the one hand clitics are a sign of increased efficiency in terms of saying more common words more quickly, but on the other hand they kind of add complication because there are some contexts where the full forms of the words would be fine and yet the clitic doesn’t work, giving you one more thing to keep track of. We also talk about clitics and reduced forms of words in Yolmo, Old English, and Dutch, and how clitic pronouns might be evolving into affixes in French and Spanish.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
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Here are links mentioned in this episode:
Wikipedia entry for Clitics
Lingthusiasm Episode 25: Every word is a real word
Lingthusiasm Episode 16: Learning parts of words - Morphemes and the wug test
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language
“That’s the kind of linguist I’m” via All Things Linguistic
Is there some rule against ending a sentence with the contraction "it's"?
Ending a sentence with a contraction via WordReference.com Language Forums
Why Does It Sound Weird to End a Sentence with a Contraction? By Neal Whitman
Wikipedia entry for Ash Ketchum
Lingthusiasm Bonus Episode 52: Gotta test 'em all - The linguistics of Pokémon names
Wikipedia entry for Weak and Strong forms of words
Wikipedia entry for Dutch pronouns
A Case Study in Verb Polysynthesis via Reddit
Wikipedia entry for Grammaticalisation
Lingthusiasm Episode 54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language
Twitter thread about virtual conference design for linguists
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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 60 show notes page.
[Music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about space between words and affixes, also known as clitics. But first, we have an announcement. We’re doing a special drive to encourage people to become patrons of Lingthusiasm this month.
Gretchen: If you’ve been meaning to become a patron and just never quite gotten around to it, now is a great chance to join. We’re gonna be sending out packs of four Lingthusiasm stickers to everyone who’s a patron at the Ling-phabet tier on November 3, 2021.
Lauren: This is going to be a Lingthusiasm logo sticker, two different versions of our “Schwa, Never Stressed” stickers in different colours, and a bookplate sticker for Because Internet, which Gretchen is going to sign for you.
Gretchen: Yes, I am. Make me sign a lot of stickers. You can stick these stickers on your laptop, your water bottle, anywhere else you wanna have an excuse to bring up how cool linguistics is in polite company.
Lauren: If you’re already a patron at a lower level, first of all, thank you! And second, this is a great reason to upgrade as there are some cool things available, especially if you stick around in this tier, including your name and favourite IPA character on our Supporter Wall of Fame.
Gretchen: If you don’t already have a favourite IPA character, you can take our extremely scientific “Which IPA Character are You” quiz and find out.
Lauren: We hand choose all the IPA characters for our supporters on the Wall of Fame.
Gretchen: From the results of this highly scientific quiz.
Lauren: Plus, you also get a “Lingthusiast” sticker after three months of this tier that Patreon sends you.
Gretchen: That’s so many stickers. That’s five stickers. Two different things in the mail.
Lauren: If you’re already supporting us at this level or a higher level, you also get the sticker pack, and we’ll be sending you a message to remind you to make sure your address is up-to-date so we know where to send those stickers. Finally, all patrons at all levels, we appreciate you so much. As we say every episode, it’s our patrons who keep the show ad-free and who also get access to monthly bonus episodes, including our most recent, Number 54, an interview with Emily Gref of Planet Word. You also have access to our Discord to chat with other Lingthusiasm and linguistics fans.
Gretchen: We had a really fun time talking with Emily from Planet Word. Hopefully, we’ll get to check out that museum at some point. So, go listen to that.
[Music]
Gretchen: Okay, Lauren, I have a sentence for you and a task, if you’re okay with that.
Lauren: Yep. Sounds very exciting.
Gretchen: I’m gonna give you a sentence, and then in this sentence, I want you to identify the words and the affixes. That’s prefixes and suffixes.
Lauren: I’m gonna grab two different coloured pens. I’m very excited.
Gretchen: This is one of those Grade 8 English class underlining things.
Lauren: This is why I love linguistics puzzles. You get to crack out the coloured pens.
Gretchen: Exactly. The sentence is, “Later today, I’ll know if I hafta get some prizes for Helen of Troy’s competition, or if it isn’t necessary.”
Lauren: Before I even begin to pull this wonderful sentence apart, can we just revel in the fact that so many sentences that get said have never been said in the history of humanity before.
Gretchen: I’m pretty sure that this one has not been said in the history of humanity before.
Lauren: I like this sub-story of The Iliad that I’ve never heard before. I’ll go with it. I have an advantage that I am looking at this sentence on a piece of paper. I’m pulling out lots of words. “Prizes” is a word. But I can pull “prizes” apart because I can have “prize” and then the plural S. “Prize” gets one colour, and the S gets another colour. We’ve also got “competition.” I know “com-” is a prefix, and “-tition” is a suffix that can change the word.
Gretchen: So maybe like “compete” and “-tition” or something like that?
Lauren: Yeah. We have a whole episode on morphemes and how they build up into words. We’ll link to that in the show notes. I feel pretty comfortable with the things that are words, and I feel pretty comfortable pulling out things that are affixes. But, Gretchen, I only have two colours of pen, and I’ve got some words that I’m a bit stuck on.
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: “Hafta,” as you have pronounced it and as it’s written – H-A-F-T-A.
Gretchen: As I very carefully said “hafta,” which is not my usual reading vocabulary, but there we are.
Lauren: Casually carefully you pronounced it. I know that that is an informal pronunciation of “have to” – “I have to get” – but it’s one of those things that everyone does. It’s so common. I want to kind of treat “hafta” like a single word. I’m a bit stuck on that one.
Gretchen: But you’re not sure if you’re gonna but you just sort of wanna just to put a few more in there.
Lauren: Yes. I’m gonna put “hafta” with a bit of a question mark. I’m gonna add “I’ll” to that category because, again, that “-ll” at the end of “I’ll” – I know and you know that that’s a conjoined form there. It’s normally “will” as a full thing, but it can just as easily be “I’ll.” I feel like “-ll” is kind of an affix, but it’s more word-y than an affix.
Gretchen: Yeah. Because for something like “prizes,” you don’t know where the /z/ is coming from. There’s not some other word that you know where it’s from.
Lauren: Exactly. Then, “Helen of Troy’s” is an interesting phrase because it’s got that /s/ on the end, but unlike the /s/ in “prizes,” it’s relating to the whole of “Helen of Troy’s.” It’s not just relating to Troy there. Again, question mark on that one. And the “-n’t” in “isn’t” is a bit like the “-ll” in “I’ll.”
Gretchen: We’ve got three tricky things at the boundaries which I have to confess that I carefully constructed this sentence to make it a tricky situation because we wanna talk today about what’s going on with things that are kind of word-like but also kind of affix-like and are in that tricky boundary in between the two. We’ve got a few examples like, “I’ll, “hafta,” “Helen of Troy’s,” and “isn’t.”
Lauren: We not only have talked about morphemes in an episode, we’ve talked about words. We’ve talked about whether something is a word or not in a way that was really focused on meaning. For these, a lot of it is not so much about meaning but about the shape of the affix or the shape of the word that it would’ve been as a full word. It’s revisiting that topic but from a different perspective.
Gretchen: I think the thing that’s satisfying to me is that these nebulously defined word and affix-y-like things have a name for them which is not as well-known as “word” or “affix,” these well-known things, but they’re called “clitics.” When we were preparing for this episode, we were looking up, “Okay, what is the formal definition for ‘clitic’ anyway? Surely someone’s written this. We can just read it out.” The answer is that linguists disagree.
Lauren: Indeed.
Gretchen: Linguists disagree a lot about exactly what a clitic is precisely because it occupies that interesting space between, you know, here are these things that you can very clearly say them all by themselves in isolation like “I” and “will” and “is” and “not,” and then here are these things that you very clearly have to put them on a word. They’re incoherent without a word. And then some stuff that floats around the sentence that you’re like, “Okay, maybe this is a full word. Maybe it’s attached to something else.” It’s a little bit unclear what the status is. Different clitics can behave in different ways, and they can all be lumped together as here’s this big category of stuff that we don’t know what to do with. Or you can be someone who’s really a splitter and saying, “Okay, no, these ones, I think they are more like actual affixes, and these ones, I think they are more word-y, and these are the true clitics that are the smaller set in the middle.” It really depends on if you wanna be a lumper or a splitter there.
Lauren: In order to decide what is and isn’t a clitic, you have rules and principles that are specific to the language that you’re talking about. When it comes to drilling into the specifics of English and how the grammar of English works, you can’t get much more drilling down and specificity in a single book than the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. It’s time for another episode of Gretchen’s adventures in CGEL.
Gretchen: I have a massive copy of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. It’s over a thousand pages. It has made an appearance in some previous Lingthusiasm episodes because it’s got these very, very detailed descriptions of various aspects of what’s going on in English.
Lauren: When it comes to a phenomenon like clitics where there’s a lot of slightly different things happening between different examples, something that has a lot of detail is exactly what we need.
Gretchen: Right. One of the things that CGEL talks about with respect to clitics is that there’s a grade in English between the ones that have very a restricted set of places where they can be found and ones that have a bit less restriction in terms of where they can be found. Even within clitics there are immediately, as soon as you get there, subcategories. One of those is – so clitic forms of “am,” “are,” “have,” and “will,” attach only to a subject pronoun rather than to a full noun. You can have “I’m,” “we’re,” “they’ve,” “he’ll.” CGEL says that if you have a compound subject with a noun and a pronoun in it – like a longer thing but it still has a pronoun – you don’t generally get something like, “Joe and you are in for a shock” – “Joe and you’re in for a shock.” I don’t think I’d say that.
Lauren: You actually struggled to say it. You didn’t even get it right the first time.
Gretchen: I read it on the page, and I was like, “No, I can totally say that.” Then I’m reading it out loud, and I’m like, “No, I can’t actually say, ‘Joe and you’re in for a shock.” Maybe I can say, “Both of you’ve been pretty inconsiderate.”
Lauren: [Laughs] “Both of you’ve been pretty inconsiderate.” It definitely sounds like you’re squishing two different sentences together that don’t belong together.
Gretchen: What do you think about “The Smiths will be there, and so’ll I.”
Lauren: Oh, that one actually is less bad.
Gretchen: I don’t mind that as much. You can use something like, “Pat’ll do it.” You could put it on just a noun by itself, but if you have the compound subject –
Lauren: It gets a little bit less pleasant to my intuitions.
Gretchen: “Joe and you’re in for a shock” just really doesn’t work for me, actually.
Lauren: Which is impressive that it’s getting stronger as it’s not working for you because, normally, once you’ve been exposed to these things for a while, you’re like, “Maybe? I don’t know anymore.”
Gretchen: You can put it on something like, “You could’ve been hurt,” the “-ve” works there. The one that I find more fun – and this one is less restricted. Clitic forms of “is” and “has” – you can put them in a lot of places. You have something like, “Jean’s here,” and “Jean’s taken it,” which actually sounds the same as “jeans” like the pants.
Lauren: That is true.
Gretchen: That really works. You can also put it on longer phrases which don’t work as well for “are” or “have.” You can say something like, “Which dog’s been on the sofa?” Sounds fine to me. “That they’re wet’s obvious enough.”
Lauren: “I’m gonna have to put them in the drier because that they’re wet’s obvious enough.”
Gretchen: “What do you think’s gonna happen?” Totally fine for me.
Lauren: Absolutely.
Gretchen: “Ed, I think, is going, and so’s Sue.”
Lauren: Great. Looking forward to seeing them there.
Gretchen: “Why’s this happening?” “What the heck’s she’s doing?” All of these – totally fine. You’re like, “Yeah, I can put ‘is’ and ‘has’ anywhere. It’s fine.” And then they point out that there are some bad examples.
Lauren: Okay. Please break my brain.
Gretchen: What do you think about “What salad’s that man over there eating?”
Lauren: “What salad’s that man over there eating?” That works for me.
Gretchen: This one is with a percent sign. Some people have it and some people don’t. I find it not quite as good as the others, but I think I’m okay with it. “Don’t use more force than’s absolutely necessary.”
Lauren: “Don’t use more force than’s absolutely necessary.”
Gretchen: I don’t think you like that one.
Lauren: No, that’s weird.
Gretchen: That’s also a percent sign one. Some people might like it. Some people might not.
Lauren: Yeah, I should say it’s weird for me.
Gretchen: I think maybe I can get it but maybe not. Maybe my impressions are just broken from reading this book. Here’s one they don’t think people are gonna be able to get and that’s, “Never’s it going to be easier.”
Lauren: “Never’s it going to be easier.” It definitely is a bit trip-y up-y.
Gretchen: What do you think about, “She often’s right about things.” [Pause] [Gretchen laughs]
Lauren: Is that one a percent?
Gretchen: No. That one is star. That one is nobody.
Lauren: Okay, I am relieved.
Gretchen: “Never’s” is also nobody, but “She often’s right about things” and “Never’s it gonna be easier.” Yet, “She often is right about things,” that would be fine.
Lauren: Fine.
Gretchen: This brings us to a post that went viral from Tumblr a while back. This was somebody – just-shower-thoughts – observing that “Contractions function almost identically to the full two-word phrase, but are only appropriate in some places in a sentence. It’s one of the weird quirks of this language we’ve.”
Lauren: It’s because “have” there is being used as an auxiliary instead of the full form of having and ownership.
Gretchen: Maybe. What do you think about a further comment on it? “Some people say the English language is confusing. To which I say…It’s.”
Lauren: That one definitely feels like it’s missing another word at least.
Gretchen: I’m very delighted that I added a comment to it myself, four years ago, and that that has gotten picked up in the form that keeps getting screen capped and passed around which was, “That’s the kind of linguist I’m.”
Lauren: That absolutely does not work. Congratulations on making more than one sentence that has broken my brain this episode.
Gretchen: It actually took me quite a long time to come up with that sentence, so I’m really pleased.
Lauren: I do see that circulating occasionally. It’s very satisfying.
Gretchen: Yeah, every so often I see it, and I’m like, “Oh, that was me.” I think it also speaks to a really interesting point about clitics in general because sometimes one of the things that comes up when you’re talking about reduced forms of words or smooshing words together, people will start saying like, “Oh, these are lazy,” or “These are low effort. Why are people doing this low effort thing? Shouldn’t everyone just be talking in full words with lots of pauses in between them like a robot?”
Lauren: I absolutely refer to your example as having casual features of English. That’s a slightly less judge-y way of saying the same thing.
Gretchen: Right. But the thing that’s really interesting is there are these kinds of constraints. Nobody who is saying “I’m” and “I’ll” and “I’ve” and all of these things that everyone says is doing it in this weird position at the end of the sentence.
Lauren: If it was just about laziness and efficiency, you’d expect it to be able to be used everywhere.
Gretchen: Right! You’d expect it to just be like, “Okay, yeah, we’ve just gonna do this low effort thing,” but it’s actually more effort, at least to some subconscious level, to be keeping track of like, “Okay, yeah, you can do this reduction thing in some places but not in other places.” Imagine trying to explain that to a new speaker of like, “Oh, yeah, well, no, we have this abbreviation form, but actually it’s never put here.” Like, “Wait, why? This is an extra thing to pay attention to.” There’s a lot of interesting subtle things going on in terms of where we use them.
Lauren: I hadn’t even thought about the restrictions that clitic forms in English have until you showed me places they shouldn’t be.
Gretchen: I hadn’t thought of them either. This is why you go consult a grammar because they’ve gone through all this effort to make all these beautiful, ungrammatical sentences for you. Reading CGEL about clitics also reminded me of this other thing that’s below the level of fully conscious speech in English which is that there’s a certain set of words that have stronger and weaker forms – shorter and longer forms – at a sound level.
Lauren: Because one of the features of a clitic is that it is reduced in terms of its sound compared to a full word.
Gretchen: Exactly. You don’t get a clitic that’s four syllables long because at the point when it’s becoming a clitic, it’s already, like, maybe doesn’t even have a vowel in it.
Lauren: When “will” attaches to something else a clitic to make “-ll.” You never wanna say it can’t happen because then there’ll be one example from someone somewhere, but it would be supremely unusual for something to be a clitic and then become a lot longer.
Gretchen: I think it would be weird because the words that tend to become clitics are already words that have become grammatical words and that are really high frequency. Those tend to be short as well. I mean, never say never. Maybe there’s some language that does it. But I think it would be uncommon. This gets us into this question of what are words that are potentially good targets to become clitics. These are often words that are already getting smaller phonologically. In CGEL they talk about weak versus strong forms of certain words.
Lauren: I don’t think I’ve had someone put this like this before. What would an example of that look like?
Gretchen: Their example is “I think Pat has seen it” and “I haven’t seen it, but Pat has.”
Lauren: I don’t even know what I’m listening for there.
Gretchen: You’re listening for the word “has.” “I think Pat /əz/ seen it.” “I haven’t seen it, but Pat /hæz/.”
Lauren: That’s the difference between /həz/ and /hæz/.
Gretchen: And even shorter because the “Pat has seen it” is often just /əz/.
Lauren: Ah, yeah.
Gretchen: There’s an H written there, but “Pat /əz/” – you probably don’t even say it. Then “has” has that H, and it has a full vowel, not this tiny schwa, and then they both have the /z/ there. There’s actually quite a difference in terms of how they’re pronounced. There’s about 50 words that CGEL lists that have one or more weak forms as well as a strong form. It’s gonna actually be weird to read this list because I’m gonna have to read these words in strong form because you would say them in strong form in isolation because isolation is one of the environments where you use the strong form of a word.
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: This is words like “a” –
Lauren: As in, like, “a car”?
Gretchen: Yeah, “a car.” “Am.”
Lauren: “I’m.”
Gretchen: “I’m.” “And.”
Lauren: /ənd/
Gretchen: Yeah. Or just /ən/.
Lauren: To the point where English speakers do the little /ən/ between words.
Gretchen: “Fish ‘n chips.” I’m not gonna read the whole list. You can see that there’s sort of, like, “a” and “am” and “and” are all different types of things. One of them is a verb. One of them is a conjunction. One of them is an article – a determiner. There’s a bunch of different categories. You have some prepositions like “for” which could be “for” but also –
Lauren: /fə/.
Gretchen: /fɹ̩/. You have stuff like “of,” “my,” “must,” “me,” “who,” “you,” which can become /jə/. These are all small words. All of them are a single syllable. If they begin with H, the H often gets kicked off.
Lauren: The thing I really like about “a” or “an” on that list, like “a prize,” is that this is part of an ongoing journey for that word. Because that word started off as “an,” which was essentially the word “one.” Then “one” went off in one direction with all of its articulation still, and then “an” became “a” and is now just /ə/. It’s why you get things like /əloʊn/.
Gretchen: Exactly. Or “only” because it was /oʊn/. The fun thing is, is “a” can be reduced to just /ə/, but /əv/ can also be reduced is just /ə/. “To” can also be reduced to just /ə/. You have gonna /gənə/, lotta /latə/ – “a lot of things” – /gənə/, /goʊ/. All of them can get reduced because they all occur in such different environments that it’s never ambiguous which one is which. What’s interesting is that if a word becomes a clitic – it’s because a lot of the English words started out as a weak form of a word and then subsequently became a clitic.
Lauren: The thing that makes me so happy about this is when we started this episode, I thought we were gonna look at what was between an affix and a word and that that was gonna be clitics. Now, I find out there’s a thing between clitics and words and that everything is on these processes. There are multiple steps that you can watch happen.
Gretchen: The thing that’s interesting about the steps is they interact. Something can become a clitic if it’s already in the weak form. It can become even weaker and become a clitic and really hang onto or lean onto the word next to it. But the reason why you can’t say something like, “That’s the kind of linguist I’m,” is because you can’t even use the weak form of “am” at the end of a word like that.
Lauren: How satisfying.
Gretchen: This was our “I haven’t seen it, but Pat has.” You also can’t say, “I haven’t seen it, but Pat’s.”
Lauren: No. Because I don’t even know what that /s/ is there.
Gretchen: Yeah. But “I think Pat’s seen it” – fine. “I haven’t seen it, but Pat’s.” This context forces you to use the strong form of a word, which means it’s not even a possible target for becoming a clitic, which is one of those subconscious things that you’re like “I didn’t even know I knew this.”
Lauren: I do feel like a lot of not ever noticing this phenomenon of weak forms is because we are so dependent on English writing for the way we conceptualise words even when we hear them. If you’re a very literate English speaker, your perception of the written form can play tricks on your brain in terms of the pronounced form.
Gretchen: I said, “I think Pat /əz/ seen it” to you several times, and you were like, “Yeah, the H is still there,” and I’m like, “I’m not saying an H.” Because the writing is like, “Hey, look, there’s an H.” It’s just not there.
Lauren: Absolutely hallucinated that H there.
Gretchen: The fun thing is, is not every language does this. When I was studying Dutch for a bit, one of the things that was fascinating to learn was that they actually do have different spellings for strong and weak forms of their pronouns.
Lauren: So good.
Gretchen: For example, the Dutch word for “me,” which is – you’ll be able to see the cognates with English – can be written M-I-J, which is pronounced /me/, or it can be written M-E, which is pronounced /mə/. This is probably true of English as well. There’s an emphasis given to “me” and then like, “Yeah, he gave it to me, and then whatever.” There’s probably a /mə/ form in English as well, but they’re both written the same way. You do sometimes see this for pronouns, especially for third person pronouns. Like, “Give it to ‘im,” “Give it to ‘er,” “Give it to ‘em.’” You sometimes see those written with an apostrophe instead of the H, but it’s not something you get a table of like, “Make sure you learn these weak forms,” in the same way as Dutch.
Lauren: No, I absolutely have not.
Gretchen: There is a fun story with, actually, this “‘em,” if you say something like, “Go get ‘em.” What does that E-M stand for?
Lauren: “Them.” Because it’s third person plural.
Gretchen: Well, you’d think because that’s what our modern third person plural is. But in what other context do we drop a /ð/ sound?
Lauren: It’s true. It’s not one of those easy-to-loose sounds.
Gretchen: Right. We have a strong and a weak form of “the.” You have /ðʌ/ or /ði/. Then you have /ðə/. But when you’re reducing it, you’re reducing the vowel. You’re not taking it down to /i/.
Lauren: True.
Gretchen: The “‘em” is actually a form of “hem,” which was the object third person plural pronoun in Middle English.
Lauren: Oh, how satisfying.
Gretchen: Right. Before we had “he,” “she,” “it,” “they,” we had /he/, /heo/, /hɪt/, and /hie/. These sound extremely similar to each other. There was differentiation that happened. We acquired the form “she.” Then we also acquired the “they” and the “them” instead of /hie/ and /hem/ from Norse.
Lauren: But kept our habit of using the old weak form.
Gretchen: But kept the old weak form the same with that dropped H. It’s just sort of crept along. It’s crept along in such an oral way. Because you’re not getting that from writing. You’re getting it from other people speaking in a chain.
Lauren: This is true. Although, I do find it even more satisfying now that the Pokémon trainer Ash has the surname Ketchum “Catch ‘em.” Bits of his name are in Old English.
Gretchen: There’s some Old English stuff that’s just getting re-spelled by modern speakers to refer to something.
Lauren: How delightful.
Gretchen: This is actually something that I think is a really interesting area for development in English because we have this unstressed form in the “they” paradigm, which it’s a relative newcomer in English even though it’s centuries old. But other neo-pronouns in English like “xe/xem,” you’ve got to think like, okay, they’re gonna need unstressed forms as well. They’re gonna need weak forms like /zə//zəm/ as well so that they can be used in all of the same contexts. Maybe people are already, probably, doing this subconsciously.
Lauren: Sounds like a fascinating research paper. I think I should point out even single, tiny digression we’ve been on and every single example CGEL gives has been agonised over and thought about. The space that it fits in between words and affixes has been pondered over long and hard. As we said, it is very dependent on the specific features of the language that you’re working with to decide if something is an affix or a clitic. I thought I’d give an example from the languages that I work with when I had to decide, writing the grammar of Yolmo, if I was gonna treat some things as affixes or some things as clitics.
Gretchen: Please tell me how you made that decision.
Lauren: Because the criteria are language-specific, like English, I was looking at things that weren’t quite as attached to individual words as affixes. There are affixes in Yolmo. There’s one if you want to say that you’re counting a number of people, you put an affix on the numeral that indicates specifically that that numeral is related to two people or five people. That can only ever go on a numeral. Then you have these affixes like the plural. You might have “the dogs,” or you might have “the dog of my friends.” Even though in English that sounds like a possessive, that’s where you could put the plural in these languages.
Gretchen: Oh, so “the dog of my friends” is actually, like, several dogs belonging to my friend?
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Which is sort of like “Helen of Troy’s party” or something like that. That S is actually possessed by “Helen” not possessed by “Troy.”
Lauren: Yeah. It’s a bit more free-floating than the affix that has to go on a number. So, you go, “Well, maybe it’s a word,” but it can’t be a word either because words have tone in Yolmo and many Tibetan languages. These plural markers don’t have tone. You go, “Well, it’s not an affix because it’s more free floating. And it’s not a word, so it doesn’t have tone. It’s a clitic!”
Gretchen: Yay! We have this third category.
Lauren: Thank goodness I have more than two coloured pens because for this part of this grammar using the term “clitic” became incredibly helpful.
Gretchen: That’s such a good example of how the diagnostic criteria is really language specific because you’re like, “Okay, well, it doesn’t have tone, so it can’t be a word.” I assume that there’s an entire chain of logic for why all words have tone. But in English, this is like, okay, this is not the diagnostic criteria you’re gonna use.
Lauren: Absolutely. Some of the criteria in English around weak forms or reduced pronunciation doesn’t work in these languages. Coming at it from a language-specific perspective is really helpful.
Gretchen: Sometimes, also, coming at it from a language-specific perspective will be influenced by the history of the writing system for that language and how the language was written down because, you know, if people are used to writing something as the full form, even though the speech sometimes for quite a long time has been reducing it more and more, there’ll still be this tendency sometimes to be like, okay, we’re gonna write out the full form. That’s why it feels so recoverable. Or we’re going to – okay, yeah, but no one actually says it that way, but there’s still all this written stuff that can influence what people are thinking about.
Lauren: I sometimes wonder if English “a” and “the” would be more likely to be treated as clitics if they were physically attached to the words they were in front of.
Gretchen: Yeah, if they were written there with a little apostrophe or something. When I was looking at this, I was surprised to find that some people think that “n’t,” (like “isn’t,” “can’t,”) isn’t actually a clitic in English. It’s just an affix – it’s on the whole word. Because I was like, “But this is so clearly related to ‘not’” – but also it affects the vowels of the thing it’s attached to. You have stuff like “won’t,” which isn’t really transparently “willn’t.” Maybe these are some reasons to say, “Actually, this is an affix now. It just happens to resemble the negative thing.”
Lauren: I do wonder if English cycles of things becoming attached and becoming more like an affix have been arrested a little bit because of that tradition of writing.
Gretchen: There’s this really fun one that I’ve noticed in English that really trips up people who speak languages with fewer vowels than English. This is the “can/can’t” distinction. In English, in unstressed words, if you have a T or D after an N, it often gets deleted. This is why you see “fish ‘n chips” with that N there. It happens all over the place. It happens constantly – place names, people say Toronto (toronno) /təɹɑnoʊ/ without the second T because it’s something you say a lot. This is super common in English – super normal. It happens in all of these negative words. Like, “don’t” becomes /dən/, which is fine because it’s not contrasting with another /dən/.
Lauren: But if you remove the /t/ in “can’t,” you get “can,” which is confusing.
Gretchen: Which is the positive form. But no, it’s not actually confusing in practice for speakers of English who have all of the vowels that English is used to, because there’s also a reduced form of “can,” which is /kən/. Most English speakers most of the time actually make the distinction between /kən/ and /kæn/ where /kən/ is positive and /kæn/ is negative. It’s just got a full vowel.
Lauren: It’s absolutely one of those things that I will have to go find examples in my own speech before I believe that I do this, but I am open to being shown.
Gretchen: I have witnessed this in conversations where you have one native English speaker and one second language English speaker. The native English speaker will be like, “No, no, no, I /kæn/ do it.” And the non-native English speaker will be like, “You’re saying you can, but it seems from the context like you can’t.” They’ll be hyper-articulating the /kæn/ with even more emphasis on the vowel and still not putting the T in that would actually let you figure out what was going on because the T is just so far gone. There’s a fun example in the musical Hamilton where there’s a line about the young Alexander Hamilton who’s poor and has no money and is working at his first job. The line is “Trading sugarcane and rum and all the things he /kæn/ afford.” The way that the performer gives the real stress on /kæn/, like, it’s not even a reduced form anymore because he’s putting this real stress on it, but there’s no T. It’s extremely clear from context that he can’t afford them. It’s very distinctly articulated. There is no T there anywhere.
Lauren: But as long as we have this writing system, people are gonna hallucinate that T.
Gretchen: If we were sensible, we could just spell them with different vowel symbols and actually just do the thing that we think we’re doing, but we’re not gonna do that.
Lauren: I feel pretty safe to say.
Gretchen: Another place where you see this real, real effect of orthography is in French. I came across, a number of years ago, a Reddit post that, alas, I cannot find anymore where somebody had posted, “Hey, guys, I have this new conlang. It’s got subject prefixes. It’s got object prefixes. You could put negation as a prefix. You can do all this stuff as a thing.” It was like, “Here’s this conlang that’s got these very long words that have all these different prefixes and so on stacked on them. What do you think of my new conlang?” If you read it out loud, it was actually French written phonetically.
Lauren: [Laughs] What a sneaky joke.
Gretchen: It’s really interesting. I know it was a joke, and I think that there are still arguments why French is not a massively agglutinative language with all these subject prefixes and so on. But ever since that joke post, I have never been entirely certain anymore.
Lauren: Again, you need something that’s the equivalent of CGEL for French to do the hard work of picking it apart.
Gretchen: Not just CGEL for French, but it would have to be CGEL for spoken French. Because written French comes from this tradition where it’s not, but modern day spoken French is quite divergent from written French. There’s even more of an aspect in learning how to read where you learn a bunch of stuff that used to be true, and then you have to unlearn that to talk to people. A really interesting example is there’re a lot of languages where you change the form of the verb, and then you can tell what the subject is. This is still true in a bunch of other Romance languages. Spanish and Italian, you change the verb, and you can tell if it’s me or if it’s you. In French, you do change this in the writing, but what you actually do is you have to have the pronoun. So, if you have something like, “Je prends les crêpes. Tu prends l'omelette,” which is what you might say at a restaurant – “I’ll take the crepes. You can have the omelette.”
Lauren: Thanks for ordering for me. I hate making choices. [Laughter]
Gretchen: You have the “je” and the “tu” that’s telling the different there. But these are, in French, clitic pronouns. They’re definitely at least clitics because you really have to put them, and you have to put them leaning on the verb. You can’t say them in isolation.
Lauren: That’s a really good diagnostic criterion.
Gretchen: You could, in English, say, “Who ordered the crepes?” You could say, “Me.” You could say, “It is I,” if you wanna sound kind of formal. Both of these are sort of okay. In French, you cannot say, “je.” Like, “Who ordered the crepes?” “Je.” No. No, no, no, no, no, no. You need to use this whole other form of the pronoun, which is the only one that can happen by itself, which is “moi.” Then, if you wanna be emphatic about it, you can say, “Moi je prends les crêpes,” which is often translated sort of like, “Me, I’ll have the crepes.” But it actually shows up in the same context as in a language like Spanish or Italian where you would actually just put in the normal subject pronoun because you don’t normally need it because the verb at the end tells you.
Lauren: Amazing.
Gretchen: I really kind of wanna make the case that this is actually – it’s not even a clitic anymore. It’s actually fully glommed onto the verb. But, you know, the Académie Française is gonna completely disagree with me.
Lauren: It is a good demonstration that something – and a lot of the examples we’ve discussed in this episode start as words and then, in English, we’ve seen those weak forms of words, allow them to become clitics. With the literal etymology of “enclitic” in Latin being “to lean” – so begin to lean on words. They’re not fully attached. They’re just leaning on them. Which I get a very cosy visual image with that etymology. Then, once they’ve been leaning on words for long enough, they become dependent and really attach to them as affixes. This process of going from being an independent word, especially in these functional categories, through to being a fully-attached part of the grammar is something that happens repeatedly within a single language across time and across all of our spoken and signed human languages – this process of grammaticalising through from being words to affixes and occasionally stopping off as clitics in between.
Gretchen: Sometimes a clitic is this pathway. If you think of “n’t” in English where it’s like, okay, maybe that’s a clitic, but maybe there’s actually good reasons to say that it’s part of the whole word by now. Sometimes, something can stay clitic-y, like maybe that apostrophe S in English. There’s all sorts of stuff along the way. I mean, you could also see, in Romance languages, it’s so well-established and has long been talked about historically that the pronouns are clitics that maybe some of them are actually not becoming clitics. Like in French or in Spanish, you can do both the pronoun and the full noun in some contexts, like “Le di un regalo a mi madre,” which is literally like, “To her, I gave a gift to my mother.” In English, you can’t do this.
Lauren: Really doubling down there.
Gretchen: You’re doing both. In Spanish you can. You can make the argument that maybe this is the beginning of just marking the object on the verb, which lots of languages do. Then they do have you put the full noun as well. This is a pathway to making it more grammatical than the same thing in English where they’re competing for the same position.
Lauren: It just happens so frequently in this direction and, incredibly rarely, in the other direction that something will break free from a word. We’ve talked about “ish” as a – something’s grammatical-ish. It can break away and become its own thing, ish, now. But the reason we keep bringing up that one example is because it’s so unusual and that the tide just flows in the other direction overwhelmingly.
Gretchen: The normal thing is for stuff to get smaller and shorter, especially when it’s said a lot, and then gradually start merging with the words around it. It’s such an interesting experience to me thinking of yourself in the middle of a language’s history rather than at some sort of end point, like everything that was going on was building up to this, and to say, no, the stuff that we do now that’s slang-y or casual or seems like it’s just reduced effort is gonna be like, oh, yeah, no, here’s this really grammatical thing that happens in another dozen generations.
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So recently, we talked some about two different kinds of morphology, derivational and inflectional affixes. And we had a discussion back in the comments, we ended up having a discussion about a topic I’ve long liked: the ways that not isn’t the same thing as the contracted -n’t [nt].
So traditionally, [nt] has been thought of as a clitic, which is an independent morpheme that's been shortened and attached onto another independent morpheme, making it look a bit like an affix. The [z] sound found at the end of "she's" can be a cliticized form of either "is" or "has," and the [j] sound found at the beginning of "y'all" is a cliticized form of "you." By analogy, [nt] is supposed to be a cliticized version of "not."
But because [nt] is supposed to come from [nɑt], we’d expect to be able to find one wherever we find the other. And that turns out to be not quite true. So, in general, we only find [nt] after modal and auxiliary verbs, which isn't too surprising, since we usually only find the uncontracted form [nɑt] after modal and auxiliary verbs, too. In cases where [nɑt] follows something else, though, we see a different pattern. While we can say (1a), we can't say (1b).
(1a) She will try not to dance too much.
(1b) *She will tryn't to dance too much.
This preference on the part of [nt] for certain classes of verb (i.e., modals and auxiliaries) is more a characteristic of affixes than clitics. Because of this, some linguists have proposed that [nt] is actually the same sort of thing as -able [əbɫ]. That is, it's a suffix that doesn't come from [nɑt] any more than "-able" [əbɫ] comes from "able" [ejbɫ] (except historically).
(2a) Kimmy is unbreakable =/= *Kimmy is unbreak able
But even if [nt] is a clitic of [nɑt], it still definitely patterns differently. For one, it can sometimes cause a unique change inside the word it attaches to; for instance, "will not" becomes "won't" and not "willn't." And sometimes it can't show up when you'd otherwise expect it to, like how there are no contracted forms of either "am not" or "may not" (at least, in standard English; let's leave "ain't" for another day).
If you'd like to explore more about how we can tell the difference between clitics and affixes, you can check out this short but thorough discussion on the topic, but we’ll come back to talk about it more in the future, too. It shouldn’t be too long. ^_^
Arika Okrent has a nice list of holiday (ish) proclitics, including 'tis, 'twas, and the not-terribly-festive y'all:
English likes to stick contractions on the end of words. "They have" becomes "they've," "I will" becomes "I'll," and "do not" becomes "don't." The shortened parts of these words are called enclitics — they are a bit more independent than suffixes, but like suffixes, they attach to the ends of words. English also used to have a number of proclitics — shortened words that attach to the beginning of other words. Most proclitic words are now archaic or obsolete, but every December the neglected proclitics get their revenge, as a holiday avalanche of "'tis" rolls through town.
'Tis, a shortening of "it is," has a Dickensian, Christmasy ring to it. For a time, it was far more common in writing than its counterpart "it's." The final shift from "'tis" to "it's" took place in the middle of the 19th century, when Dickens was writing his novels. That was also when the lyrics to "Deck the Halls" were first published. "'Tis the season" is now so deeply embedded in our linguistic consciousness that the perfectly normal phrase "it's the season" just sounds weird, like Mick Jagger singing "I can't get any satisfaction."
Another fun set are old-timey swear words, such as zounds (from God's wounds), 'struth, and 'sblood.
Clitics are a type of morpheme that is midway between a full word and an affix: they depend on another word but not as tightly as an affix. Just like we can have prefixes and suffixes, we can also have proclitics (before the word they lean on) and enclitics (after the word they lean on). Apparently there are also mesoclitics and endoclitics which are like the infixes of the clitic world, but they're pretty rare.
