Clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host.SIL International (2003). SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms: What is a clitic? "This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003." Retrieved from . A clitic is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the ''form'' of affixes, but the distribution of function words. For example, the contracted forms of the auxiliary verbs in ''I'm'' and ''we've'' are clitics. Clitics can belong to any grammatical category, although they are commonly pronouns, determine ...
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Lexical Integrity Hypothesis
The Lexical Integrity Hypothesis (LIH) or Lexical Integrity Principle is a hypothesis in linguistics which states that syntactic transformations do not apply to subparts of words. It functions as a constraint on transformational grammar. Words are analogous to atoms in that, from the point of view of syntax, words do not have any internal structure and are impenetrable by syntactic operations. The ideas of this theory are complicated when considering the hierarchical levels of word formation and the broad variation in defining what constitutes a word, and when words are inserted. Different theories have been proposed by linguists to further refine this theory in order to account for cross-linguistic challenges to the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis. Two linguists, Joan Bresnan of Stanford University and Sam Mchombo of the University of California, Berkeley, maintain the idea of words as unanalyzable units; re-evaluate this theory using evidence from Bantu to resolve clitics' app ...
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