Gaining the perspective of language-family-oriented grammar design:
Predicative Special Clitics in Slavic

In the context of determining and formally describing typological
similarities – the shared grammar – of Slavic languages, we discuss a
distinguished set of elements which, based on their morphosyntactic
behaviour, can be regarded as special clitics (in the terminology of Zwicky
1977). Our specific approach (argued for in Avgustinova et al. 1999) is
based on two ideas: abstracting over language-specific morphosyntactic
realisation and breaking down grammatical constructions into a number of
primitives common to all of the languages in question but distributed
differently over them.

Among Slavic languages a basic distinction has to be made between those in
which pronominal, reflexive and auxiliary clitics exist (e.g., Bulgarian,
Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene) and those which
have no such clitics (e.g., Belorussian, Russian, Ukrainian). We look more
closely at the situation in Bulgarian, Czech and Polish. These three
languages are indeed representative of the observable morphosyntactic
variation in the area of predicative cliticisation across Slavic.

On the abstraction level of shared grammar, a common Slavic inventory of
predicative clitics can be postulated in terms of feature specifications
referring to type, case and index (i.e. person-number-gender) information.
To a considerable extent, Slavic predicative clitics are characterised by
what we may tentatively call 'prosodic autonomy'. This property is
manifested in a non-constant direction of prosodic attachment – cf. the
'movability' of Bulgarian core verbal clitics, the association of the
Wackernagel clitics in Czech with a 'second' position rather than with a
prosodic host to their left or to their right, the general looseness of
prosodic constraints on Polish pronominal and reflexive clitics.

Polish, however, obviously deviates from the situation in a language like
Bulgarian, where all predicative clitics are verbal, or in a language like
Czech, where all predicative clitics are sentential and occupy the
Wackernagel position in the clause. The affixing weak auxiliaries, which
otherwise belong to the distinguished Slavic set of predicative clitics,
exhibit a strictly enclitic behaviour.

Presenting a possible view of cross-Slavic parameterisation, we sketch a
taxonomy of predicative clitics, based on the syntactic domain of
distribution and phenomena like clustering, climbing and haplology. This
allow us to formally distinguish the following sets, with each of them
being further associated with a bunch of constraints on distribution within
the respective syntactic domain.

1. Verbal clitics: their domain of distribution is the verb complex, they
form a cluster, and are clause-bound (no climbing and no haplology). This
is the richest complete set represented by Bulgarian core verbal
clitics. For constraints on clustering cf. Avgustinova 1997, pp. 47–66.

2. Sentential clitics: their domain of distribution is the clause, they are
not clause-bound and show climbing and haplology effects. This is a
restricted set.

2.1. Second-position (Wackernagel) clitics are sentential clitics forming a
cluster which occupies the Wackernagel position in the sentence. For
constraints on clustering cf. Avgustinova and Oliva 1995.

2.2. "Free" clitics are sentential clitics with a syntactically free
behaviour with respect to clustering, i.e. there are almost no constraints
on their positioning in Polish. This is a reduced restricted set.

3. Affixing clitics are represented by Polish 'floating inflection'. Their
domain of distribution is the clause of their predicate, but they do not
participate in clitic cluster formation and are clause bound (hence, no
climbing, no haplology).

The latter type refers, in fact, to the set of clitics that is most
grammaticalised across Slavic. (For example, the corespondents of Polish
weak auxiliaries have 'disappeared' in Russian past tense forms; the
third-person forms of the same auxiliary are systematically dropped in
Bulgarian renarrative verb forms, and – similarly to the situation in
Polish – are totally absent in Czech past-tense forms).


References

Tania Avgustinova: Word order and clitics in Bulgarian. 1997. Saarbrucken
Dissertations in Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, Volume
5

Tania Avgustinova and Karel Oliva: Wackernagel Position and Related
Phenomena in Czech. Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch. Band 41. Wien: Verlag
der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1995: 21-42

Tania Avgustinova, Wojciech Skut and Hans Uszkoreit: Typological
Similarities in HPSG: a case study on Slavic verb diathesis. "Slavic in
HPSG", ed. A Przepiorkowski and R. Borsley, CSLI 1999: 1-28

Arnold Zwicky: On Clitics. Indiana University Club. Bloomington, 1977