Clitic
In morphology and syntax, a
clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. The term is derived from the Greek for "leaning". It is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the
form of affixes, but the distribution of function words. For example, the English possessive
’s is a clitic in the phrase
the king of England's horse: It
looks like a suffix, but its position at the end of "the king of England" rather than on "king" is like that of a separate word. Clitics can belong to any grammatical category, although they are commonly pronouns, determiners, or adpositions. Note that orthography is not always a good guide for distinguishing clitics from affixes: clitics may be written as separate words, but sometimes they are joined to the word on which they depend, or separated by special characters such as hyphens or apostrophes. The word "clitic" is often used loosely for what may be better described as an affix or word.