CLITIC

Clitic

In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. The term is derived from the Greek for "leaning". It is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the form of affixes, but the distribution of function words. For example, the English possessive ’s is a clitic in the phrase the king of England's horse: It looks like a suffix, but its position at the end of "the king of England" rather than on "king" is like that of a separate word.

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clitic

Noun

  1. A morpheme that functions like a word, but appears not as an independent word but always attached to a following or preceding word.
    In English, the possessive -'s is a clitic.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: clitic
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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