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
|
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