Prominence as an anchor for a clitic: prosody-sensitive placement of the conditional subordinator <em>ki</em> 'if' in Kazym Khanty

Abstract

Research on clitics usually distinguishes between syntactic and phonological clitics (e.g. Embick &amp; Noyer 2001; Anderson 2005). The latter ones are treated as highly locally restricted (Embick &amp; Noyer 2001): they can be dislocated to the nearest possible host, i.e. attach to a nearest overtly realized head in the clausal spine or flip order with the nearest full word, irrespective of its category. Such analyses makes a prediction that phonological clitics cannot skip full words or overtly realized heads, when they are seeking for a host. In more recent research some counterarguments to this prediction have been introduced, e.g. Irish pronominal clitics (Bennett et al. 2016) and Tiwa focus clitic (Dawson 2017), which are displaced in the prosodic structure and are sensitive to bigger constituents, i.e. phonological phrases. A goal of this paper is to provide one further counterexample to this generalization and to argue that not only phonological phrases, but also prosodic prominence can play a role in clitic displacement. Namely, I describe the behavior of the conditional clitic in Kazym Khanty (Ob-Ugric, Uralic) and argue that its placement can be only analyzed as a prominence-sensitive displacement in the hierarchically organized prosodic structure. I argue that the conditional clitic in Kazym Khanty attaches to the most prosodically prominent prosodic phrase, which is defined independently. The distribution of Kazym Khanty ki ‘if’ also allows to falsify a descriptive generalization that all C-clitics stay close to the edges of a clause. This is indeed not the case with ki, since the correct analysis of the data must allow it to leave its base-position and occur clause- and phrase-internally (contra Embick &amp; Noyer 1999). The study is based on my own fieldwork with native speakers of Kazym dialect of Nothern Khanty language (Ob-Ugric, Uralic).