Willem Koopman

Another Look at Clitics in Old English

Personal pronouns have distributional properties which are in important respects different from those of full NPs. Pronominal objects of a preposition, personal pronoun subjects and objects have therefore been analysed as clitics. A clitic analysis has also been proposed for adverbs. In this paper I concentrate on the question of how we can recognise clitics. Some proposed criteria are tested on the Old English material, leading to the conclusion that there is some support for a clitic analysis, but that it cannot be concluded that personal pronouns are always clitics. It is likely that they behave sometimes like ordinary NPs. Adverbs are unlikely to be clitics.

Transitional syntax: postverbal pronouns and particles in Old English

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