1. Forum
  2. Usenet
  3. SCI.LANG

  • Re: Pronoun Clitic Development in English?

    From Stefan Ram@21:1/5 to Grimble Crumble on Tue May 27 07:46:19 2025
    Grimble Crumble <grimblecrumble870@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:
    Does my theory seem correct?

    Yeah, your take lines up with what we see in linguistics.
    English, especially when folks are just talking casually or
    using different dialects, tends to have object pronouns acting
    kind of like clitics, similar to what you get in languages
    like Spanish.

    Still, English doesn't really have a full-on clitic system
    like the Romance languages do; it's more of a sliding scale,
    from regular forms to weaker ones to stuff that acts kind
    of clitic-y, depending on how and where it's used.

    Does your English dialect show this change?

    I'm a native German speaker living in Berlin, so I don't have
    my own English dialect, but I can say that this clitic thing
    pops up a lot in casual English across a bunch of dialects,
    at least based on what I've read.

    Have linguists written about this?

    In "Clitcs - A Comprehensive Bibliography 1892 - 1991":

    |In English, various forms of auxiliary verbs have "reduced"
    |variants that are phonologically dependent on the word immediately
    |preceding them, as in "Your friend from Chicago's going to arrive
    |soon", with a /z/ variant of "is" attached to "Chicago".

    .

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Stefan Ram@21:1/5 to Stefan Ram on Tue May 27 08:58:08 2025
    ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
    In English, "'s" is probably the go-to example of a
    "real clitic". Based on your argument, "'em" would
    give you another "real clitic" in English.

    "6.2.2 Weak or clitic pronouns?" in "A History of English Reflexives:
    from Old English into Early Modern English" (2006) - Rebecca Sinar
    mentions "'em" as a "weak form", not calling it a "clitic". This
    sections is mainly about whether OE pronouns can be called "clitic".

    So, I cannot find a source where your (Grimble's) observations
    were used to argue that "'em" is a real clitic in English.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Stefan Ram@21:1/5 to Stefan Ram on Tue May 27 08:44:29 2025
    ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
    In "Clitcs - A Comprehensive Bibliography 1892 - 1991":
    |In English, various forms of auxiliary verbs have "reduced"
    |variants that are phonologically dependent on the word immediately >|preceding them, as in "Your friend from Chicago's going to arrive
    |soon", with a /z/ variant of "is" attached to "Chicago".
    .

    What I could see was probably an excerpt from:

    |Nevis, Joel A., Brian Joseph, Dieter Wanner, and Arnold M.
    |Zwicky (1994), Clitics: A Comprehensive Bibliography
    |1892–1991, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Specifically, the chapter "What is a Clitic?", which describes
    "clitic" at one point as a kind of vague umbrella term,
    and I think it is worth a read.

    There is also "On Clitics" (1977) by Zwicky, which goes into
    detail about different languages, including English, treating
    some English pronouns (like "him") in "2.2 Second class".

    Grimble Crumble <grimblecrumble870@gmail.com> writes:
    In English, we see a roughly similar construction in forms like “I know >>‘em.” The 'em here isn’t just a casual pronunciation of "them". Unlike >>"them", "'em" cannot be used in isolation and never takes stress.

    In English, "'s" is probably the go-to example of a
    "real clitic". Based on your argument, "'em" would
    give you another "real clitic" in English.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Stefan Ram@21:1/5 to Stefan Ram on Tue May 27 10:52:43 2025
    ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
    So, I cannot find a source where your (Grimble's) observations
    were used to argue that "'em" is a real clitic in English.

    So, English has these weak forms like "'em" (short for "them"
    [today]), and while they kind of look like the clitics you
    see in languages like Spanish or Italian, they're not really
    the same thing. Here's the rundown on why:

    - First off, in Romance languages, clitics have to show up
    in certain spots around the verb. Sometimes they're
    before, sometimes after, and it depends on the verb form
    and what you're saying. Like in Spanish, you get stuff
    like "me lo dijo", where the clitics are all lined up in a
    row. In English, though, "'em" just sits in the usual
    object spot. You can't move it around, and you can't stick
    it before the verb or anything weird like that. "I threw
    'em out" works, but "*I threw out 'em" is just not a
    thing.

    - Also, English weak forms are really just the regular
    pronouns said fast or kind of mumbled. They're not their
    own thing in the sentence; they're just the same old
    pronouns, only trimmed down. In Romance languages, clitics
    are more like their own deal, and you can't just swap in a
    regular pronoun wherever you want.

    - Another thing: Romance clitics like to stick to the verb
    and sometimes pile up together, which you never see with
    English weak forms. "'em" doesn't team up with other weak
    forms or get glued to the verb; it just hangs out where
    the object goes.

    - Plus, Romance clitics are way more baked into the grammar.
    You kind of have to use them in certain situations,
    and they play by a bunch of rules depending on tense,
    negation, and all that. English weak forms are just a
    casual way of saying things, not something the grammar
    really cares about.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Christian Weisgerber@21:1/5 to Grimble Crumble on Tue May 27 18:40:08 2025
    On 2025-05-27, Grimble Crumble <grimblecrumble870@gmail.com> wrote:

    I've been learning Spanish, and I've noticed a parallel between my southern dialect and Spanish. My theory is that English is developing a system of pronoun clitics similar to Spanish.

    You have sighted the tip of a small iceberg. English has some fifty single-syllable function words that come in strong and weak forms.
    The weak forms are unstressed and, in accordance with English
    phonotactics, drop any initial /h/. The list includes most personal
    pronouns. As you already noted, synchronically "'em" /əm/ serves
    as a weak form of "them" /ðɛm/, alongside /ðəm/, although diachronically "'em" is not a reduced form of "them".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_and_vowel_reduction_in_English#Weak_and_strong_forms_of_function_words

    Pronoun clitics are a common feature of the Romance languages, which, like English, have shifted from more synthetic to more analytic syntax.

    Clitic pronouns are widespread and also occur in languages described
    as synthetic, e.g. Slovene, Czech, Ancient Greek or Sanskrit. While
    absent from Classical Latin, the pan-Romance distribution of clitic
    personal pronouns suggests that the development must have already
    started in Vulgar Latin.

    What makes English fairly unique is that our nominative pronouns (I, he,
    she, we, etc.) constitute a special, dependent class. Perhaps “clitic”

    What _is_ unusual, from a Standard Average European point of view,
    is that English cliticizes verbs (copula, auxiliary, modal) to
    subject pronouns: I am > I'm, I will > I'll, etc.

    What's that? "is"
    What's he done now? "has"; also note the weak/enclitic "he"
    What's that do? "does"

    isn’t quite the right word, but these pronouns usually are awkward when used in isolation (except in very formal contexts). For example, if I ask, “Who did it?” you probably wouldn’t reply “He!”; instead, you’d say “He
    did!” or (informally) “Him!” On the other hand, in Spanish, replying with
    just "Él" to "¿Quién lo hizo?" feels perfectly natural, since nominative pronouns are full tonics (can be used independently and be stressed) in Spanish; only objective case pronouns in English serve this function in the spoken language.

    It's just that the subject pronouns in English are now largely
    limited to marking the subject, while the default forms are the
    object pronouns... but things become a lot more muddled when
    coordination is in play: "Me and you went there", "between you and I".

    In French, the subject pronouns are strictly cliticized to the verb
    and independent pronouns have a separate form. In Spanish you might
    have "¿quién? - yo", but in French "qui? - *je" is impossible and
    you need "qui? - moi". French uses its equivalent of the Spanish
    prepositional pronouns (mí, tí) as independent pronouns.

    Does my theory seem correct? Does your English dialect show this change?
    Have linguists written about this?

    I think in English the use of the weak forms is governed by prosody.
    The use of the clitic pronouns in Romance is determined by grammar.
    That is a significant difference.

    --
    Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)