Typology and Diachrony, of Inflectional Morphology and Pronominal Clitics

What is it about?

The Theory of Functional Grammar (Simon C. Dik 1989, Anna Siewiersk 1991) does not recognize explicitly the INFLECTIONAL type in addition to the FREE PRONOUN, CLITIC and APPOSITIONAL type. On the basis of data from a number of IE and non-IE languages cogent evidence is presented for its recognition. It is argued that the CLITIC type is insufficient to cover data of both agglutinative and inflectional languages, or, from the point of view of typology based on pronominal elements, to distinguish between referring to participants in discourse by mens of pronominal clitics vs. personal affixes which are not synchronically analyzable as clitics.

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Why is it important?

In the diachronic section various shifts from the FREE PRONOUN to the CLITIC to the INFLECTIONAL or APPOSITIONAL type in the history of individual languages are examined, and it si shown that the DEGREE of FLEXIVITY may vary from one to another language, or even within one language from one to another morphological category. For instance the suffix -on of the 1st Sg Imperfect in Ancient Greek (e-graph-on 'I was writing') fuses the grammaticakl meaning of Person/Number/Tense into one morpheme which is not diachronically analyzable, while the suffix -tu of the 1st Sg Perfect in Arabaic (katab-tu) encodes on ly Person/Number and it is diachrnically identifiable as the the clitic form of the free pronoun ana:ku 'I' (see the Yemeni (dialectal) and Geez counterpart katab-ku, where -ku is a reduced clitic form of (ana:)ku).

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