Endoclisis and Mesoclisis

Abstract

AbstractMost clitics tend to be placed at the edge of a host, either as proclitics, to the left, or as enclitics, to the right. More rarely, however, clitics may also appear within the host word and these cases are referred to in the literature, rather interchangeably, as either mesoclitics (from Lat. meso ‘middle’) or endoclitics (from Greek endo ‘inside’). The idea that clitics may interrupt existing words has attracted much suspicion over the years and is almost uncontroversially regarded as a threat to lexical integrity. However, as is the case for clitics in general, endoclitics/mesoclitics also do not represent a uniform category. It is therefore essential not to draw conclusions before understanding what the properties of each case are, how they impact on the host word and whether they attach syntactically or morphologically. In this entry we try to shed light on the phenomenon of endoclisis/mesoclisis by examining two sets of word‐internal clitics, namely mesoclitics in European Portuguese and endoclitics in Udi. These two case studies provide us with extremely challenging and at times conflicting evidence as to the syntactic versus morphological nature of the phenomenon. But we hope to show that a careful evaluation of available diagnostic criteria is of utmost importance when drawing conclusions about the nature of the morphology‐syntax interface. Section 1 offers a general discussion of clitics. Section 2 deals with mesoclitics in European Portuguese and Section 3 with endoclitics in Udi. For each case study, we start with a description of the grammatical properties by applying well‐established criteria developed for the clitic‐affix distinction; having established the mixed nature of both the European Portuguese and Udi clitic systems, we then offer a brief discussion of existing analyses. The conclusion in Section 4 presents a summary of our findings.