Abstract
Polish auxiliary clitics constitute an interesting set of data which draws attention to cross-linguistic differences among Slavic languages. A general principle for clitic placement in Indo-European languages is the one described by Jacob Wackernagel in his 1892 work. He concluded that clitics appeared in the second position in the clause, after the first word in a sentence. This pattern was true to some degree in Old Church Slavonic and still holds for a number of contemporary Slavic languages e.g. Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Czech and Slovak which have second position clitics. Bulgarian and Macedonian have verb adjacent pronominal clitics and Polish has auxiliary clitics (Migdalski 2007, 2010, Pancheva 2005). Also in the older versions of Polish language the above mentioned tendency was strong.
 In Modern Polish auxiliary clitics attach to the l-participle most frequently. However, one of the unusual properties they possess is the ability to choose almost every clausal element for their host. Polish auxiliary clitics can trigger morphophonological alternations on their hosts, which is an affix-like property; however, at the same time they display clearly clitic-like behaviour when they attach freely to words of any lexical class.
 The aim of this paper is to present and analyze the morpho-syntactic properties of two kinds of auxiliary clitics: bound and free. The bound clitics carry person-number agreement markers for past tense (the so called ‘floating’ or ‘mobile’ inflections). The free clitic is the morpheme by used for conditional and subjunctive mood.
Highlights
One of the first attempts to classify clitic systems cross-linguistically was Wackernagel’s (1982) study on Indo-European word-order
The aim of this paper is to present and analyze the morpho-syntactic properties of two kinds of auxiliary clitics: bound and free
Another typology created from a cross-linguistic perspective based on data from many unrelated languages comes from Zwicky (1977) and analyses clitics as phonologically-weak elements which differ in syntax and in the relationship to their full forms
Summary
One of the first attempts to classify clitic systems cross-linguistically was Wackernagel’s (1982) study on Indo-European word-order. Bulgarian and Macedonian, to Germanic and Romance languages, have verb-adjacent clitics which means that the verb is always a host for a clitic (Migdalski 2007, 2010, 2016, Pancheva 2005, Van Riemsdijk 1999) Another typology created from a cross-linguistic perspective based on data from many unrelated languages comes from Zwicky (1977) and analyses clitics as phonologically-weak elements which differ in syntax and in the relationship to their full forms. He introduced a twoway distinction between simple and special clitics. Some of the examples of operator clitics are: Czech prý, which is used to report non-witnessed events; interrogative complementizer li (present in many contemporary Slavic languages such as Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian); and operator clitic že in Czech and Russian, and że in Polish which mark the focus of a sentence
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