Affixes and clitics - grambank/grambank GitHub Wiki

Many features are concerned with affixes and clitics. Both affixes and clitics are phonologically bound to a neighbouring element. The difference between affixes and clitics lies in the different types of items they can attach to:

• Affixes combine with hosts belonging to just one grammatical category (e.g. only with nouns or only with verbs). Prefixes precede their host; suffixes follow their host.

• Clitics may occur with different types of host categories (e.g. with a noun or with an adjective, depending on which comes last in the noun phrase). In practice, one could say that affixes mark individual words, while clitics mark whole phrases or even whole clauses. Proclitics precede their host constituent; enclitics follow their host constituent.

Many features in Grambank concern both affixes and clitics. The features on prepositions and postpositions are special in this regard: proclitics count as prepositions and enclitics count as postpositions. Since affixes generally mark individual words and not whole phrases, they do not count as adpositions.

Grambank counts the separate elements of circumfixes as affixes. If one of the elements of a circumfix precedes the host it attaches to, we treat it as a prefix. If one of the elements of a circumfix follows the host it attaches to, we treat it as a suffix.

Grambank does not count nonconcatenative morphology (e.g., ablaut) as affixation.