Meklenborg Salvesen, Ch. & H. P. Helland (eds.): Challenging clitics

Sammendrag

Despite being at the center of many discussions since the 1930s, clitics are still puzzling objects for any theory of natural languages. Great advances have been made in their description, analysis and in assessing the consequences that those analyses have for general linguistic theory, but still there are a number of basic problems about the nature of clitics, the structures built by them and the factors that determine their behaviour that have not been solved to complete satisfaction of all researchers. The articles compiled by Meklenborg Salvesen and Helland in this volume make a significant contribution to the understanding of these questions, but more importantly still, raise new questions and problems.
The puzzling behaviour of clitics is best summarised in this famous quote from Sapir (1930: 70-71), discussing the nature of pronominal enclisis (right-attachment of a clitic to a host, as in Spanish da-me-lo 'give-me.dat-it.acc, Give it to me') ...