Clitics

Clitics have raised much discussion, mainly with regard to their status. As they, generally speaking, do not bear a lexical accent, they cannot be considered prototypical words. Indeed, clitics share features of bound morphology. However, some of them have a morphological behavior similar to prototypical words: typically, clitic pronouns can inflect, and in Greek they actually do, displaying fully-fledged paradigms which are similar to those of accented pronouns. For this reason, and even more for their distribution, they hardly qualify as affixes. It then seems better to consider clitics as non-prototypical words, located at some point in the middle of the continuum between free and bound morphemes. Greek has a vast array of clitics; in addition, various items which bear a graphic accent share the placement restrictions of clitics. Such items are traditionally called prepositives and postpositives in grammatical descriptions, a terminology which reaches back to Apollonius Dyskolos (2nd c. CE).