Principles of cliticization
All morphemes begin their life as lexical words or stems. Their cliticization to other stems is governed by the following general principles:
• Functional relevance: Morphemes tend to cliticize to stems to which they were functionally relevant at the time of grammaticalization.
• Serial position: Morphemes tend to cliticize at the syntactic position they occupied — as words — at the time of grammaticalization.
• Syntacticconfiguration: Lexical morphemes do not merely find themselves in a particular linear position at the time of grammaticalization. Rather, they most often are in a particular syntactic configuration — construction — with the words they cliticize on.
• Clausalcontext: Grammatical and morphological innovation tends to occur in the most common, neutral clause type (main, declarative, affirmative, active). Conversely, non-neutral clause types often preserve frozen relics of older grammatical stages, in both morphology and word-order.
• Supra-segmentaleffects: Morphemes cliticize to large lexical stems because they are de-stressed and thus cannot stand alone as phonological words.
• Bleaching: Once a morpheme is de-stressed and cliticized, its phonetic erosion is accelerated.
• Attachment: Once a morpheme cliticizes to a word, it tends to retain its morphotactic position. So that morphemes who cliticize later seldom displace it.
