ABSTRACT
This chapter examines enclitics and the clitic group composed of the host plus the enclitic in the Fuzhou dialect, within the framework of prosodic phonology, on the basis of the discussions in previous studies on clitics and the clitic group across languages. From the perspectives of morphosyntactic functions and phonological behavior, a thorough study of relevant Fuzhou data reveals that Fuzhou enclitics share some common properties with clitics in other languages. The clitic group composed of “host+enclitic” has very peculiar phonological behavior as compared to lexical items and phrases, which provides motivation and evidence for the establishment of the clitic group domain in this dialect. Moreover, a Fuzhou clitic group consisting of “host+enclitic” may dominate another clitic group, constituting a great challenge to the Strict Layer Hypothesis in the theory of prosodic phonology. This can be handled by resorting to a weakening of the Strict Layer Hypothesis, instead of excluding the clitic group from the prosodic hierarchy.
