Suppressing the Zs

Abstract

The label CLITIC has been applied to a wide variety of phenomena, from words that are prosodically dependent on neighbouring words (as are unaccented monosyllabic prepositions and personal pronouns in English) to words, or even individual morphemes, with idiosyncratic syntactic distributions (like the second-position pronominal and adverbial particles in many languages). I propose here to reserve the term for elements whose description requires more than the stipulation that they may or must be prosodically dependent.