cliticaugmentation

Cliticaugmentation is a proposed morphosyntactic phenomenon in which clitics attached to a host word contribute additional semantic or syntactic force, thereby augmenting the information content of the host rather than merely indicating pronoun reference or tense. In this view, clitic augmentation expands the grammatical profile of the host by encoding features such as evidentiality, mood, aspect, definiteness, number, or discourse status.

The mechanism resembles standard clitic behavior in that clitics are phonologically dependent on their hosts and form cohesive clitic groups, but the functional outcome is distinct: the attached clitic augments the host’s value beyond basic agreement or clitic doubling. Clitics can be enclitic (occurring after the host) or proclitic (occurring before the host) and may interact with prosody, word formation, and syntactic cohesion in complex ways. The result is a host word whose interpretation is extended by the presence of the clitic, sometimes creating new paradigmatic contrasts or altering argument structure.

Typologically, cliticaugmentation is discussed as relatively rare and is often treated as a potential byproduct of contact-induced clitic systems, serializing morphologies, or heightened functional layering in small languages. Critics argue that what counts as augmentation versus conventional clitic function can be fluid across languages and analyses, making cross-linguistic generalizations challenging.

See also: clitic doubling, clitic climbing, evidentiality, agglutination, morphosyntax.