Review : “ Aspects of the theory of clitics ” by Steven

Clitics are a notoriously difficult topic that has received much attention, from a number of theoretical vantage points, since the appearance of Zwicky's (1977) seminal article " On clitics. " What emerges from this vast body of work is that clitics are more easily characterized by what they are not, than by what they are. Elements referred to as clitics systematically defy the general distributional and other principles that otherwise hold in the grammar. But while the phonology and syntax of clitics appears to be unlike the phonology and syntax of other linguistic elements, there are no obvious phonological or syntactic properties that uniquely characterize the class of clitics. These and other important issues are addressed, and insightfully disentangled, in Steven Anderson's important and much needed book Aspects of the Theory of Clitics. This is a tightly organized study, with each chapter filling in a portion of the overall formal landscape of the theory of clitics, and is a follow up on Anderson's earlier work on this topic (Anderson 1992, 1993, 2000). It relies on a large data base and has an impressive empirical coverage which does justice to the diversity of this linguistic phenomenon. The central theme of this work is how to capture the behavior of clitics by invoking the formal mechanisms that can handle the intricacies of clitics while also accounting for linguistic phenomena other than clitics. In other words, Anderson's theory subsumes clitics under the general principles of the grammar, in sharp contrast to some earlier approaches which treat them as idiosyncratic elements that call for clitic-specific grammatical devices. But while in Anderson's theory the class of elements descriptively referred to as clitics are accommodated by general formal mechanisms, clitics do not emerge as a single formal class. Rather, they are characterized as " linguistic elements that display prosodically deficient phonology, anomalous morphosyntax, or both " (p.33). We now turn to the details of Anderson's account, which begins with an attempt to answer the difficult question, what is a clitic. Anderson starts with a negative characterization: clitics are not a primitive category, either lexical, or grammatical, or prosodic. For the positive characterization of clitics, Anderson takes as his point of departure Zwicky's (1977) well-known classification into simple clitics, special clitics, and bound words. In this classification, simple and special clitics differ from bound words by possessing non-clitic alternants (e.g., the clitic me alternates with moi in …