Nominal TAM - Related Grammatical Phenomena - Verbal Clitics

Verbal Clitics

Although verbal clitics such as -'ll in English are attached to nouns and indicate TAM information, they are not really examples of nominal TAM because they are clitics rather than inflections and therefore not part of the noun at all. This is easily seen in sentences where the clitic is attached to another part of speech, such as "The one you want'll be in the shed".

Another way to tell the difference is to consider the following hypothetical dialogue:

• "I thought you said that she read the book."
• "No, I said she will read the book." "No, I said she'll read the book."

The speaker cannot emphasise the future time by placing voice stress on she'll, and so instead uses the expanded phrase she will. This is characteristic of clitics as opposed to inflections (i.e. clitics cannot be emphasised by placing voice stress on the word to which they are attached).

The significance of this can be seen by comparison with a second hypothetical dialogue, using the English negative suffix -n't (which is best understood as an inflection rather than a clitic):

• "I thought you said that it is a good book."
• "No, I said it is not a good book." "No, I said it isn't a good book."

In this case the speaker could choose to say isn't rather than is not. Even though the stress then falls on the syllable IS, the meaning of the sentence is understood as emphasising the NOT. This indicates that isn't is one inflected word rather than a word with a clitic attached.