ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a bird’s-eye view of the roles of clitics in syntax. First, we examine how clitics can be treated in some basic phrases. Some of them such as clitic nouns, clitic adjectives and postpositions function as the head and others such as clitic adnouns, clitic adverbs and delimiters as a modifier in the phrase. Then, we observe properties of the three types of clausal connectives, that is, nominalizers, adnominalizers and adverbializers. Since they are clitics, they are assigned to lexical categories. They are shown to belong to nouns, adnouns and adverbs, respectively. They take the preceding clause as their complement and become NPs, AdnPs or AdvPs. Under this analysis, there are no subordinate clauses in Korean, unlike in English. For example, since the unit of a nominalizer and its complement clause becomes an NP rather than an S, the clause does not bear a direct relation with the higher clause.
