Re: USAGE: Circumfixes

Trebor Jung said:
> Mark L. wrote:
>
> "Latin -que is called an enclitic because it's attached to the end of
> another word, like a suffix. It would be called a proclitic if it were
> attached to the beginning of another word, like a prefix."
>
> So why not just call it 'prefix' or 'suffix'?
The terms 'prefix' and 'suffix' refer to morphologically bound morphemes.
Clitics are not morphologically bound, by definition -- they're
morphologically free but phonologically bound, whereas prefixes and
suffixes are both morphologically and phonologically bound.


> Or do clitics work like Henrik described?:
>
> "[C]litics 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."
I think Henrik's restatement is basically correct, except that clitics can
work at any syntactic level, not just clauses ("the king of England's hat"
is not a clause). The main point is precisely that clitics are part of
syntax, not morphology (if you care to differentiate), even though they
appear phonologically (and sometimes orthographically) to be part of the
morphological structure of the word.


-- Mark

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