Finnish Particle Clitics and General Clitic Theory. Working Papers in Linguistics No. 33

A doctoral dissertation on general clitic theory and Finnish particle clitics in particular looks at the mixed linguistic status of clitics and proposes that they are not as mysterious as reported, but should be viewed either as bound words (bound lexemes) or phrasal affixes. An initial chapter introduces the Finnish particle clitics and their characteristics and status. A second chapter presents a syntactic account of (sentential) connective and epistemic adverbs and the closely related class of conjunctions, within the framework of generalized phrase structure grammar, to illustrate how Finnish particle clitics are related to independent words that function as sentential adverbs. A third chapter identifies syntactic, semantic, and prosodic properties common to the sentential adverbs and particle clitics, and another chapter reviews the literature on cliticization. Finally, a discussion of the morphosyntactic status of the particle clitics is presented, offering some external evidence for the bound word status of second position clitics. Appended materials include notes on bound words in the Finnish lexicon and a brief comparison of Finnish and Lappish morphology. (MSE)