Clitic Сross-Reference in American Languages

Cross-reference is a way of expressing person and other characteristics of clause arguments beyond the semantics of the noun phrase. Cross-reference can be analyzed with regard to the position of marker in the sentence and with regard to its type. The first classification corresponds with Nichols’ taxonomy of morphosyntactic marking (Nichols 1992). Cross-referencing marker is always dependent, which means that it can be a clitic or an affix. This paper contains the description and analysis of clitic cross-reference in American languages. Clitic cross-reference is opposed to affix cross-reference by a set of criteria analogous to the set differentiating clitics and affixes in other constructions. This research describes two types of position that a cross-referencing clitic can take. The first type — second or Wackernagel position — distinguishes clitcs, but the second type — position near the head, in the clause near the predicate — is typical for affixes too. The criteria distinguishing clitics can be phonological, distributive and positional. The research classifies the criteria of cross-referencing clitic distinguishing and shows how differently it can behave.