Clitics and particles

Typological and theoretical speculations about clitics require that the CLITIC be adequately distinguished from the INFLECTIONAL AFFIX on the one hand and from the INDEPENDENT WORD on the other. The first of these tasks has been attended to, but the second has been slighted, with the result that many items labeled ‘particles’ have been treated as clitics. After some remarks on the nature of ‘tests’ in linguistics, a series of tests is provided here for distinguishing clitics from independent words. On the basis of these, it is concluded that most of the ‘particles’ in the literature are simply words; from this conclusion, it is argued that treating words with idiosyncratic distributions as acategorial ‘particles’ is wrong. We then consider the relevance of various cases of ‘particles‘—in German, Chrau, Hidatsa, and Welsh—to theoretical proposals about special clitics. These examples include some items that are independent words, some that are inflectional affixes, and others that are independent words with simple clitic variants. Finally, a class of DISCOURSE MARKERS is delineated: a grammatical category of items which are often classified as ‘particles’ but which turn out, again, to be independent words rather than clitics of any sort.*