ABSTRACT
Clitics are identified as a set of words whose prosodic dependence must be indicated in the lexicon. This chapter shows that certain of the defining phonological and syntactic characteristics of clitics follow naturally from the proposed lexical representation: prosodic subcategorization frames. Past definitions of clitics have distinguished clitics from nonclitics on certain phonological grounds. The chapter explains Zwicky's position by addressing a kind of counterexample to the generalization that phrasal distribution implies clitic status. The banishment of clitics from lexical rules sharply limits the number of possible prosodic candidates for their prosodic subcategorization frames. Prosodic constraints on clitic positioning like those holding in Serbo-Croatian have been noted for other languages in the literature. English differs from Serbo-Croatian, in which virtually no function words are phonological words. Kivunjo Chaga is perhaps a more convincing case than Hausa from a phonologist's point of view, as it exhibits an abundance of phrasal phonological rules to diagnose the existence of phonological phrases.
