Cherokee Clitics

The Word Boundary Problem

Abstract

The problem of identifying Cherokee clitics is complicated by the fact that the prosodic word, marked by the presence of a tonal boundary, may not match the morphological word. Clitics may or may not respect the the word boundary as marked by tone: they may attach outside the boundary tone or carry the tone themselves. The data suggest Cherokee recognizes the morphological word and affix as independent linguistic phenomena, such that simultaneous alignment of morphological with phonological edges is sometimes riot realized. Also raised is the question of syntactic boundaries as another parameter in the definition of clitics.