Workshop at SLE 2026: Clitics, Clitic Placement, and Cliticisation

26-29 août 2026, Osnabrück (Allemagne)

Email de contact : Marc Olivier-Loiseau, <marc.olivier-loiseau@tcd.ie>
Site de l’événement : https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2026/

Date de soumission : 17 novembre 2025

Modalités de soumission : We invite abstract submissions for a Workshop on ‘Clitics, clitic placement, and cliticisation’ as part of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Each oral presentation will be assigned a 25-minute slot (20 min. presentation, 5 min. discussion, 5 min. room change). Provisional abstracts should be no longer than 300 words and focus on an aspect relevant to the study of clitics. The deadline submission is November 17th 2025. Abstracts should be sent to the convenor: marc.olivier-loiseau@tcd.ie.

Argumentaire & thèmatiques :

1. Clitics

Linguistic research on clitics has produced significant empirical and formal studies. These elements qualify neither as ‘words’ nor as ‘affixes’ and showcase striking characteristics across morphology, syntax, prosody, and phonology.
The hallmark of clitics is their deficient nature. However, well-known tests like “a clitic cannot be stressed” or “a clitic cannot be coordinated” only capture broad generalisations and fail to capture micro-issues. The literature offers evidence of stressed clitics and clitics with disjunction, suggesting that usual tests need refinement.

This raises the question: if not all clitics are clitics in the same way, should we consider a spectrum of cliticness? Are there clitics that are more clitic-y than others? Non-European data adds complexity: Makassarese appears to differentiate ‘affixal clitics’ from ‘free clitics’, while Mapudungun has morphemes dubbed ‘anti-clitics’ that syntactically incorporate into a host yet maintain some phonological dependence.

Structural questions remain contested. Some authors analyse clitics as heads, some as phrases, and some as both simultaneously. Does this vary across languages? Is it only a formal question, or is it supported by empirical evidence? Regarding the morpheme itself, approaches differ on whether Romance pronominal clitics should be analysed as simplex or complex elements containing multiple features (person, gender, number, and possibly determiner elements).
From a diachronic perspective, clitics result from weakening. Latin strong pronouns gave rise to Romance clitics. Pronominal clitics exist in a wide variety of unrelated languages, leading to questions about their genesis: why are pronouns susceptible to becoming clitics, and how does it happen? From the viewpoint of language change, clitics must be considered in the light of grammaticalisation.

2. Clitic Placement

The most striking observation is that clitics appear in a derived position across languages. In Standard Modern Greek and most Romance varieties, full objects follow the finite verb whereas object clitics precede it. In Old Hittite and in the diachrony of Bulgarian, clitic elements necessarily appear in second position of the clause.
The generative literature broadly distinguishes three approaches:
– Base generation approach: clitics are generated in the position in which they appear
– Movement approach: clitics are generated in an argumental position and move to the position in which they appear
– Agree approach: clitics are generated in an argumental position and are realised as agreement morphemes

Each approach opens formal questions. Are Clitic Phrases universal projections in a fixed order? If clitics move, do they do so as phrases, heads, or both, and where do they land? What featural makeup allows clitics to be realised through agreement? Should we strive for a one-size-fits-all analysis, or are different approaches better suited for different languages?

Clitic placement issues also involve phenomena including:
– Second-position clitics: What ‘counts’ as second position?
– Clitic doubling: Why and how do some languages double their object with a clitic?
– Clitic climbing: Why do some predicates allow clitics to appear in a different clause than the one they originate in?
– Clitic reduplication: What leads to the same clitic being pronounced twice?

The workshop welcomes studies that question, revisit, and update the formal mechanisms of clitic placement, as well as new empirical descriptions and generalisations.

3. Cliticisation

Further prosodic and phonological requirements apply on top of clitic placement rules. Because clitics are dependent elements, they must find another element to lean onto. Cliticisation specifically refers to the mechanism(s) through which clitics attach to their prosodic host.
The differentiation between clitic placement and cliticisation is crucial: in some languages the prosodic host and the syntactic host are the same element, whereas in others they are distinct. French and Romanian illustrate this contrast, with French clitics leaning right onto the verb and Romanian clitics leaning left onto a preceding element. Interestingly, French once behaved similarly to Romanian before shifting its cliticisation pattern.

In languages where clitics must find a prosodic host to their left, clause-initial position is illicit. In Amazigh languages, if no prosodic host precedes them, clitics swap positions with the verb. Does this mean cliticisation impacts clitic placement? Several solutions involving phonological mechanisms have been proposed, including prosodic inversion, interface-driven verb movement, and copy deletion. These approaches share the involvement of phonology/prosody in word order.
Furthermore, ‘attaching to a host’ may oversimplify what clitics do. Clitics can attach to either a prosodic word or a phonological phrase, contributing to crosslinguistic variation. The question becomes: what constitutes a host?

4. Potential research questions:

The aim of the workshop is to explore clitics from all possible perspectives, from methodological matters to theoretical ones, and case studies. Both synchronic and diachronic studies are welcome, and those working on under-explored languages are encouraged. We invite abstracts engaging with the following research questions and related issues, as well as those mentioned throughout the call:

1. What is a clitic?
2. Can we strictly define a clitic category? Should we talk about subcategories of clitics?
3. What drives clitic placement? Are there different mechanisms, or is it a universal phenomenon?
4. How do clitics attach to prosodic hosts? Are there different mechanisms, or is it a universal phenomenon?
5. How does cliticisation influence clitic placement?
6. How do current methodological and theoretical advances allow us to approach the study of clitics? What improvements are needed?
7. How does language change give rise to clitics? What about clitic loss?
8. What other linguistic phenomena (broadly defined) do clitics interact with?
9. What can we learn from comparative analyses of clitics?