Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

From:    vehke <vaksje@...>
> Personally I use 'clitic' for a morpheme not limited to a grammatical
> category, i.e. can be added to any word, regardless of the language's
> usual phonological constraints. Clitics thus don't convey any
> grammatical information, AFAIK.
Be wary of generalizing like this.  Most professional linguists
agree (that I know of, anyway) on Zwicky and Pullum's list of criteria
separating clitics from affixes:

 Zwicky, Arnold and Pullum, Geoffrey 1983. Cliticization vs.
  inflection: English n’t. Language 59: 502-513.

The argument (and it almost works for me) is that "n't" in English
is an affix, not a clitic as most people think.  (I would list them
here if I were near my copy of the paper.)

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
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