Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

Hi!

"Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> writes:
> > Many French particles are clitics. English 'the' and 'a/an' are clitics.
>
> Okay.  What about Latin -que?  It's referred to as a[n en]clitic, but it
> not to be a whole word even morphosyntactically.  At least, it's written
> as a suffix.
It needn't be a word.  English "'s" is considered a clitic, too.

My understanding is that clitics work on clause level, not on word
level, although, phonetically, they attach to words and cannot be used
as an isolated word.  In this sense, both English 'the' and Latin
'-que' work on clause level, but need another word to attach to
phonetically.

In Greenlandic, morphemes that attach to fully inflected words are
called clitics in contrast to affixes, which attach to stems.  E.g.
the suffix 'go to _' would be considered a 'clitic', since it attaches
to inflected words like 'in Nuuk' ('Nuummi').  And 'and' is also a
clitic there.  Both obey consistent phonology rules different from
those of affixes -- the clitics usually do not fuse so closely (though
Greenlandic is really an example where clitics do change their
environment heavily).

I'm not sure about the mentioned German prefixes like stressed
'unter-', though.

**Henrik