WORD CLASS: CLITICS GENERALITIES

1. Clitics tend to be mistaken with personal pronouns. These are two different categories, though Traditional Grammar usually refers to them as unstressed or weak pronouns. They are rather a kind of semi-bound morphemes whose nature is half-pronominal and half-verbal.

Clitics exist in all Romance languages, as well as in Slavonic ones, but not in Germanic languages. That is why they may cause certain confusion.

These are few differences between personal pronouns and clitics in Catalan (and the rest of Romance languages)

PERSONAL PRONOUNS	CLITICS
They are stressed	They are unstressed
They mark nominative and oblique case	They just mark oblique cases, more than one
They are lexemes	They are half-bound morphemes, mainly marking case
Personal pronouns may be heads of Nouns Phrases, as if they were real nouns.	Clitics can never be heads of any phrases.

2. There is equivalence between personal pronouns and clitics. In most Romance languages they are to be found together in the same sentence according to certain rules (pleonastic use). These are examples of it:

a ell, no el conec	I don’t know him
de vosaltres, no me’n fio gaire	I don’t trust you very much

3. In Catalan, clitics refer to several oblique cases:

CASE	CLITIC
ACCUSATIVE	em, et, el, ho, ens…
GENITIVE	en
DATIVE	em, et, el, li, ens…
ABLATIVE~LOCATIVE	hi

3.1. Accusative

no ho sé	I don’t know it
no m’has vist	you haven’t seen me

3.2. Genitive

de pa, no en tenim	we have no bread
no me n’han parlat	they haven’t talked to me about it

3.3. Dative

li vaig dir la veritat	I told him/her the truth
no em contis mentides	don’t tell me lies

3.4. Locative, ablative:

no hi vaig anar mai	I never went there
hi voleu jugar?	do you want to play [that game]?

4. The difference between dative and accusative is just to be found in the third person. Unlike Czech and other Slavonic languages, the rest of the persons do not show case difference. Observe the following Czech example:

nechal jsem tě	I (have) left you
nechal jsem ti peníze na stole	I have left you some money on the table

In Catalan, both forms of the clitic would be alike, since there is no morphological difference regarding the case:

et vaig deixar (a tu)	I (have) left you
et vaig deixar diners a la taula	I have left you some money on the table

5. Many verbs are called pronominal. That means they are always conjugated with a clitic. Some of them do not exist in Catalan without the clitics; others change their meaning completely without the clitic.

> fiar-se de >> to trust, to rely on

> queixar-se de >> to complain

> anar-se’n >> to leave, to go away

6. The clitic es is used as a marker of middle voice (see verbal voice), in a very similar way as in Czech:

ací es venen molts apartaments	there are lots of flats for sale here
es diu que l’hivern serà molt llarg	it is said the winter will be long

The Czech equivalents of the previous sentences are:

prodává se moc bytů tady	there are lots of flats for sale here
říká se, že bude dlouhá zima	it is said the winter will be long

7. The clitic ho has no gender or person reference, it is a kind of neutral, therefore never referring to animated beings, but to events and actions, or even to previous parts of the speech.

espero que ho entenguis	I hope you'll understand it
no ho sabeu explicar bé	you can't explain it well