Clitic Order in Hittite

Brian Agbayani & Chris Golston

The ordering of second-position clitics in Hittite (Hoffner & Melchert 2008: 410) has yet to be
explained:

Especially problematic are slots 2-4, which house the pronominal clitics. Syntax cannot order these
slots correctly because they contain heterogeneous syntactic classes:
2

dat/acc 1pl

nom 3sg

dat/acc 1sg

dat/acc 2pl

nom 3pl

dat/acc 2sg

dat 3pl

acc 3sg

dat 3sg

acc 3pl

Thus, the featural composition of slots 2-4 cannot predict their left-right order: dat and acc occur both
before and after nom; 1st and 2nd person occur in two slots and 3rd occurs in all; plurals occur in slots 2
and 3, singulars in 3 and 4. Thus if the subject-object order of -a-mu below makes sense syntactically,
(1)

nu-war-a-mu-kan

BAUS

and=QUOTE=he=me=PRT died
And she said He died on me. (DS fr. 28Aiv5)
the reverse object-subject order -nna-a below (from Craig Melchert p.c.) does not:
(2)

nu-nna-a karuu GIM-an ARAD-DUM kulawnie e[eta]

and us he earlier as

servant

k.

was

And as he was earlier a k. servant to us... (KUB 19.55+ Vo 43-44; Milwata Letterr)

Agbayani & Golston

The clitics in slots 2-4 do, however, fall into coherent prosodic groups: clitics in slot 2 have onsets and
codas, those in 3 have no onsets, those in 4 have no codas. We use this fact to make sense of the clitic
ordering in phonological terms. Specifically, the consonant-final clitics in slot 2 provide onsets for the
vowel-initial clitcs in slot 3, [nna.sas] rather than *[as.nnas]. Similarly, ordering the vowel-initial
clitics in 3 before the vowel-final clitcs in 4 [as.mu] avoids the hiatus that would result from the
opposite order *[mu.as]. Thus the phonological constraint ONSET (Prince & Smolensky 1993)
explains both why slot 2 clitics precede slot 3 clitics and why slot 4 clitics follow them.
Clitic conjunctions (in the Host slot) are taken to be in situ (Agbayani & Golston 2010); we also
propose this for quotative wa(r), both occupying head-positions in the syntax. For clitic conjunctions,
this is a conjunctive head which takes the second conjunct clause as its complement; for the quotative
clitic, we propose that it is the highest functional head in the clause, marking its complement as quoted
material. The late placement of the reflexive (slot 5) and verb-particles (slot 6) suggest that they are in
fixed syntactic positions lower than the pronominal group (slots 2-4). We treat the reflexive za and the
verb particles as syntactic heads immediately dominating the verbs projection.
References
Agbayani, Brian and Chris Golston. 2010. Second-position is first-position: Wackernagels Law and
the role of clausal conjunction. Indogermanische Forschungen 115, 1-21.
Hoffner, Harry A., Jr. and H. Craig Melchert. 2008. A Grammar of the Hittite Language. Part 1:
Reference Grammar. Languages of the Ancient Near East; 1. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky. 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative
grammar. Ms., Rutgers University and University of Colorado at Boulder.