The Source of Degema Clitics

The source of Degema clitics has not been given any attention. The popular view about the source of clitics in human language is that they developed from free lexical items, or from syntactic categories that must appear without accent in various languages, and may become affixes at a later stage (Zwicky 1977, Hopper and Traugott 1993, Bybee 1985, Spencer 1991, among others). In this study, we will look critically at these views that do not seem to account for the source of clitics in Degema, and establish the source of Degema clitics from language-internal and language-external pieces of evidence.

This work is divided into seven sections:
Section 1 provides some background information that is necessary for the discussion on clitics in Degema;
section 2 considers some general views about the source of clitics;
in section 3 we make some assumptions about the source of Degema clitics;
in section 4 we attempt to establish the source of Degema clitics from language external facts;
we examine deaffixation in other languages in section 5;
a modification of Hopper and Traugott's unidirectional cline is proposed in section 6,
we conclude the work in section 7.