Clitic Particles and the Typology of 2P Languages

This paper was prepared after the Particle Workshop (Cambridge, 30-31 October 2008) for the prospective conference volume.  I am grateful to the audience of the Particle Workshop in Cambrigde, October 30-31, 2008 and personally to Anders Holmberg, Anna Roussou and Sten Vikner for the valuable comments and criticism. I am also grateful to Natalia Serdobolskaya for the consultation concerning Dargwa examples in section 1. I am  indebted to Bostjan Dvořák for the valuable comments on Slovene clitic fronting. Finally, I would like to thank Tomas Riad for alerting me about the relevance of Agbayani & Golston’s paper. All responsibility for the statements made in this paper is my own.

This paper is devoted to the interactions of particle typology and clitic typology. I assume that the notion of 'particle' belongs to the parts-of-speech classification and define particles as function words with discourse or connective functions which are not specified as conjunctions or Ps. The notion of 'clitics' comes from a classification of word forms: clitics are deficient expressions lacking features of phonological words and taking an intermediate position on the way from autonomous word forms to affixes. The class of clitics includes pronouns, auxiliaries and particles. Particles may be either clitic-like or behave as phonological words. Clitic particles are prosodically deficient discourse or connective markers. I am focusing on the distribution of clitic particles. The paper is divided into two parts consisting of five sections each. In the first part I am assuming a lexicalist approach towards defining a class of discourse markers. In the second part I am working out a syntactic approach to clitic particles in 2P-languages, where clitic clusters occur clause-internally. I argue that 2P-languages constitute a syntactic type and share a number of type-specific constraints; I retrieve typological implications from the distribution of clitic particles and principles of clitic ordering in some 2P-languages.