Slavic Clitics as Heads

Abstract This chapter is the analytical core of the book. It argues for an approach to Slavic clitics according to which they are always introduced as functional heads. Clitics can never instantiate substantive (lexical) categories, and, in principle, any functional head can potentially be a clitic. Clitics by definition lack independent prosodic representation as a lexical propert; hence they must become attached to some adjacent prosodic word in order to acquire prosodic structure and be pronounceable. Whereas this phonological deficiency is sufficient to define simple clitics, special clitics have an additional syntactic deficiency that requires them to be syntactically adjoined as well.