Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2023-03/Allow "Clitic" as a POS header

Voting on amending WT:POS to remove "Clitic" from the list of explicitly disallowed part-of-speech headers, and to add it to the list of allowed part-of-speech headers as a morpheme type. Specifically, at WT:POS,

1. Add "Clitic" to "Allowed POS headers: • Morphemes: Circumfix, Clitic, Combining form, Infix, Interfix, Prefix, Root, Suffix"
2. Remove "Clitic" from "Some POS headers are explicitly disallowed: • Clitic, Gerund, Idiom"

Justification:

No real discussion took place on the merits of "Clitic" at the vote in 2015 that determined it would be excluded as a part-of-speech header: indeed, the only mention of "Clitic" was in the context of I.S.M.E.T.A. noting that they opposed banning it but didn't "care enough" about it to vote on that basis.

I don't see a convincing reason to ban editor communities for specific languages from using "Clitic" as a header. Some languages already use "Clitic" as a part of speech header notwithstanding the disallowance, e.g. -kaa, -e, and if "Particle" is used for units that are treated as independent words, then allowing "Clitic" also fills an obvious gap between affixes in a strict sense and particles.

Schedule:

• Vote starts: 00:00, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
• Vote ends: 23:59, 30 April 2023 (UTC)
• Vote created: —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 13:59, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Discussion:

• Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-12/Part of speech
• Wiktionary:Tea room/2023/March § Part of speech of possessive -'s

1. Support, and make the category nest under lemmas as well. Thadh (talk) 15:01, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
2. Support Whoop whoop pull up ^{Bitching Betty ⚧️ Averted crashes} 15:25, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
3. Support, and agree with Thadh that they should be lemmas. Vininn126 (talk) 16:38, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
4. Support —Soap— 17:35, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
5. Support as proposer. I agree with Thadh on categorising them as lemmas. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 22:02, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
6. Support, same as previous comments. AG202 (talk) 22:46, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
7. Support StrangerCoug (talk) 20:17, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
8. Support - Sarilho1 (talk) 10:01, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
9. Support. Nicodene (talk) 11:05, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
10. Support If everyone does it... CitationsFreak: Accessed 2023/01/01 (talk) 05:02, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
11. Support Trying to shoehorn all languages into Greco–Latin categories is ridiculous. If some languages benefit from allowing “clitic”, then I do not see any reason to ban it. Some languages would benefit from allowing “idiom” simply because that’s how these languages work, so we should also stop banning that one. MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 01:19, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
12. Support. It's used in other languages, and a clitic is undeniably different from an affix. Dylanvt (talk) 08:33, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

    • Consider our readership. Who among our readers will understand "clitic"? Think about people who are not already eyeballs deep in word-nerdery. Think about people who might have zero familiarity with the languages that you work with that might use "clitic" as a word category in academic writings.

    Who among our readers will understand "clitic"?

    Specificity is all well and good, but we must also write to the appropriate audience. I am deeply concerned that the majority of our readership won't know what this is.

    It is all well and good that "clitic", as you intend to use the term, "is undeniably different from an affix". For that matter, the class of Japanese words that we class as "adjectives", more specifically as "-i adjectives", are -- if we want to be hyper-specific -- actually a specific kind of stative verb. They even inflect for the past tense.

    But because it is not helpful to our readers to describe these as "stative verbs", we instead call them "adjectives" as the next-closest analog -- and we explain the nitty gritty at WT:AJA or at w:Japanese_language.

    Using specialist terminology for highly-visible and heavy-lifting use cases like POSes in entry structure amounts to deliberately choosing poor usability in furtherance of geekish precision. This is unhelpful and alienating.

    Per w:Clitic#Properties:

    

    According to this model from Judith Klavans, an autonomous lexical item in a particular context loses the properties of a fully independent word over time and acquires the properties of a morphological affix (prefix, suffix, infix, etc.). At any intermediate stage of this evolutionary process, the element in question can be described as a "clitic".

    

    This is presented as a continuum, with "lexical item" on one end, "affix" on the other, and "clitic" as some fuzzy middle ground.

    Our audience consists of English-language readers, people who we can safely assume are at least passingly familiar with the parts of speech used to describe English. Notably, "clitic" is not one of those parts of speech. We cannot safely assume that our audience has any familiarity with this term.

    To put my concerns another way, is it actually helpful to our readers to introduce the POS header term "clitic"? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:28, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

    Kanji, Hanzi, Hanja are also not parts of speech in English, should those be removed? Infixes v interfixes are another one that are actually confusing. And to be fair, I’ve met English natives that don’t know what an adverb even is until learning another language. I don’t think that whether or not a readers knows what clitic is an inherent issue with this vote, but more something that we should start doing with every POS that we currently have. AG202 (talk) 02:40, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

    @AG202 -- Re: "Kanji" etc., I note that entries like a#English also include POS headers like "Letter" and "Symbol", which also aren't technically parts of speech.

    Separately, I'm afraid I don't quite follow your post here -- the grammar of the "I don't think that..." sentence loses me, and I suspect there's a word or two that might be missing. What do you think we should start doing for every POS we have? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 05:59, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

    @Eirikr Yes, because "Letter" & "Symbol" are explicitly allowed from WT:POS; we do not only follow "technical" parts of speech. And yes, I just realized that my other sentence was missing something, sorry. My point was that a reader not knowing what clitic means isn't a problem with this vote. There are readers that don't even know what a verb or symbol or ideophone or Kanji is. We should focus on educating and having those explanations somewhere in general, maybe connected to WT:POS. AG202 (talk) 14:24, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

13. Support but don't use it for English entries. Allahverdi Verdizade (talk) 12:20, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

1. Oppose There are several problems with this. First of all, "clitic" is not a POS, so the fact that we label it as a POS already makes us technically wrong. Second, it's linguistic jargon and will make Wikt less accessible. Third, this will open a can of worms with the pronominal "clitics" of the Romance languages -- a terminology that is well established in Romance linguistics -- that are actually suffixes. I anticipate a lot of edit-wars switching back and forth between the technically accurate label "suffix" and the customary label "clitic", with multiple RS's justifying each. I think we may end up with a situation where we claim to use the inaccessible term "clitic" because it's technically accurate, and accuracy is more important than accessibility, but then in the most highly visited articles that have it, use it inaccurately. kwami (talk) 22:12, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

   @kwamikagami: Am I reading this wrong, or are you objecting the setting up "clitic" as a POS on Wiktionary because it isn't yet considered a POS on Wiktionary? And many dictionaries in many languages do accept "clitic" a valid POS, because in these languages the clitics have a very different function from affixes or other POSs.

   How is "clitic" a more linguistic jargon than "determiner", "suffix" or even "noun"? Just because English doesn't have a lot of them doesn't mean they are inherently more difficult to understand than any POS.

   And as for your third point, that's true for most POSs I'd say: three is a numeral, yet tolu is a verb, an sidóc is a noun. It seems weird to oppose "clitic", but not oppose "numeral", "particle" or "determiner", which are also language-specifically applied. If you're worried that certain languages will use this POS when they shouldn't, you should adress that issue, but why would you oppose its creation for languages that obviously need them? Thadh (talk) 08:35, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

   "Clitic" isn't a part of speech, period, so calling them that is technically incorrect. Of course, the same is true of prefix and suffix. I was merely saying that arguing based on whether it is technically correct is misguided. kwami (talk) 18:17, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

   It's not true that in Romance languages clitics are always suffixes. Portuguese is a obvious counterexample: the terminology "clitic" is applied to the atonic personal pronouns me, se, lhe, etc. (e.g.: deu-lhe (enclitic), me fez (proclitic), passar-se-á (mesoclitic)). Furthermore, if Romance languages are problematic, surely editors of those languages can agree to a common standard without forbidding the use of "clitics" for all other languages by default. - Sarilho1 (talk) 10:00, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

   I think your last point is key. The idea that editors can't be trusted to discuss and sort these things out themselves, so there needs to be a blanket ban across the website, seems rather patronising to my mind. The potential for edit wars exists either way in any case given that the header is already used in practice (as can already be seen below). —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 12:24, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

   Yes, the terminology "clitic" is used, but that word is used for atonic affixes, not for actual clitics. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they only dock to verbs, correct? (I'd have to check the lit for this particular case, can't find the paper I was thinking of off-hand.)

   Currently on Wikt we give its POS as "pronoun", which strikes me as a more useful classification. We can describe its behaviour in the notes, since use of the word "clitic" is too inconsistent in Romance linguistics for that to be of any use. kwami (talk) 18:24, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

   Ah, here it is. A paper in presentation by Martin Haspelmath at Max Planck: Sect. 9 is on Romance. In the abstract he says,

   the object person indexes of the Romance languages, which have very often been called "clitics", are actually affixes in the modern languages, although they must go back to earlier clitics.

   And in sect. 9,

   So far in this paper, I have hardly touched upon object indexes in the Romance languages, even though these kinds of elements are more prominent in the literature on "clitics" than any other type. The reason is that they are not clitics, but affixes. These elements are not clitics according to the definition in (1) because they are bound forms that always occur on the verb, whether preverbally or postverbally. That they are affixes rather than clitics is actually fairly widely accepted in the literature (Miller & Sag 1997; Luís 2004; Monachesi 2005: §3.3; Bermúdez-Otero & Payne 2011).

   the peculiar distribution of postverbal and preverbal object indexes in European Portuguese is a remnant of this earlier clitic stage. The situation in Modern Greek is quite similar.

   The fact that you say Portuguese is an "obvious" example of object clitics, based on your sources, despite the fact that much of the literature is in agreement that they are affixes, illustrates the problems that I am expecting if we allow "clitic" as a POS, and that I am not being patronizing in expecting this to be a problem.

   kwami (talk) 07:39, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

   If Portuguese can have conjugated infinitives, it can have clitics that are affixes, certainly. MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 03:10, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

   No, clitics contrast with affixes. That's the whole point: if they could be described as affixes, they never would have been posited in the first place. kwami (talk) 06:50, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

   You don’t think things through before you reply, do you? Infinitives contrast with conjugated forms. That’s the whole point: if they could be described as conjugated, they never would have been posited in the first place. MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 02:38, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

2. Oppose also on the grounds that "clitic" is not actually a part of speech, it's a phonological behavior. Clitics can be many different parts of speech: some are conjunctions, some are pronouns, some are adverbs, some are particles, and so on. But there is no syntactic function in a sentence that is fulfilled by clitics per se; rather, syntactic functions are fulfilled by words belonging to certain parts of speech, and in some languages some of those words may exhibit the phonological behavior of being a clitic, but that doesn't make "clitic" a part of speech. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:59, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

   This is the most reasonable counterargument I've seen - there is a similar problem with combined forms. Vininn126 (talk) 10:53, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

   @Mahagaja, Vininn126: The complaint that the header might end up overlapping with others is fair to some extent, but I don't think the problem of conceptual overlap is avoidable. Particles are a case in point given that they've themselves been subject to criticism as a meaningful category (as by Zwicky in "Clitics and Particles", which I think is still the seminal analysis of clitics! He even rejects the category as such: "everything to which the 'particle' label has been attached falls somewhere else on the hierarchy of units"). My intuition is that there is no precise, exhaustive set of non-overlapping parts of speech that will uniformly capture the way in which these units are used in every language, and in that light it's better to allow editors to decide for themselves whether this header makes sense in the context of particular languages. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 18:10, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

   Neither is prefix, suffix, interfix, root, etc. and yet they are listed as allowed POS. They are morphological categories, not syntactic ones, just like clitic. In my view, they are listed as “POS” for convenience, so that they can be used in the headers of corresponding articles, and don’t necessarily imply that, linguistically speaking, they are technically parts of speech. Moricotto (talk) 14:13, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

3. Oppose per Mahagaja's rationale above. – Guitarmankev1 ^(talk) 17:27, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
4. Oppose. No adequate use case has yet been given for this.

   As defined in the proposal, this "clitic" is indistinguishable from our pre-existing POS headers of "Prefix", "Suffix", and "Infix".

   As described when this was discussed in the Tea Room thread, the definition of "clitic" in the Wikipedia article does not agree with what we're discussing here.

   Moreover, as the Wikipedia article makes more clear, "clitic" is a wide category that contains many different things that are better treated lexically as their more specific categories. Using the "clitic" POS header for everything from English articles "a" and "the" to Finnish particle "-kaa" and English possessive "'s" is confusing and unhelpful to readers.

   We don't need this new POS.

   If there is a specific language that has a use case for the "clitic" POS header, we should discuss within the context of that language. Simply saying "let's use clitic as a new POS header for everything", without regard for use -- or our readership, who will undoubtedly be confused by this -- strikes me as very poor planning indeed. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 05:44, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

   I haven't seen anyone argue that it should be used for "a" or "the". "let's use clitic as a new POS header for everything" feels like a strawman to be quite honest. Outside of the basic ones, none of our POS headers are used for everything, I mean have you seen Hanzi, Kanji, or Hanja entries for English? We have language-specific POSs in WT:POS for a reason. Just because Clitic is being proposed doesn't mean that every language is going to or has to use it. Let's focus arguments on what is and what will actually be happening. Also, even our basic POSs are used differently by each language, because each language has its own grammar? We should give each language the freedom to list things based on that language's grammar, as it's actually more confusing to go against the language's grammar to try and fit it into Indo-European POSs. AG202 (talk) 10:59, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

   As this proposal is currently written, there is no indication of language-specific considerations of any kind.

   If this proposal is intended to be something more like "let's not disallow 'clitic' across the boards -- let's allow it for those languages where it is appropriate", then I would be on board.

   As this proposal is currently written, it is too broad and poorly defined. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:47, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

   Having to revote every time a new language community needs to use the term is extremely unnecessary. If you want to block it from being used in Spanish, for example, then that could be made at WT:About Spanish. We already have POSs that are specific to certain languages and languages that block certain POSs from being used (see: WT:About German). There’s no need to write into CFI specific language restrictions for POSs. AG202 (talk) 02:37, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

   ... I don't think this is about WT:CFI...? Perhaps you meant WT:ELE? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 06:00, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

   @Eirikr Yes, I did mean WT:ELE apologies, but the point still stands. AG202 (talk) 05:04, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

   Not the most important thing here, but I feel it's still very important, please don't confuse Finnish and Ingrian, Izhorians won't be happy if you do.

   More importantly, I have given a use case for this header for Ingrian, and this proposal doesn't say anything about forcing a header onto other languages: Some languages have no determiners. Tokelauan has no adjectives. We still allow these headers, and it's important to allow them site-wide in order to have them in the languages that do benefit for their addition. Thadh (talk) 12:49, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

   Apologies, Finnic languages are outside my familiarity and I misremembered part of the Tea room thread. It was the Finnish -kaan entry I'd actually been thinking of, and this is the one that confusingly uses "clitic", "particle", "suffix", and "ending" all in that first paragraph, and all apparently as interchangeable synonyms.

   If the entry text itself is going to be inconsistent in describing what this thing is, and two of those descriptive terms are already on our "allowed" list at WT:ELE ("particle" and "suffix"), why on earth do we need to add another POS? Especially when "clitic" itself is so loosely defined? And even more so when most English-language readers and users of a dictionary will not have any idea what this word means? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:59, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

5. Oppose. I suspect it could be overused and, as pointed out by kwami, it is not a POS. I find it odd to view "clitic" as an alternative to "Greco–Latin categories" or " Indo-European POSs" since it goes back to the Greek grammatical term ἐγκλιτικός and there is a lot of linguistic literature applying the concept of "clitic" to Indo-European languages. Like "gerund", there is the problem that it is a term used in different ways in different contexts and there isn't always agreement about its proper use even in specific languages. If there are specific languages where the term is for some reason indispensable, a more specific proposal to allow it for those languages would be great. I'm not convinced it is an improvement over "suffix" in the motivating case of English -'s.--Urszag (talk) 15:23, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

   I wouldn't call -'s a suffix either, I'd call it a postposition. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:40, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

   From a layman's point of view, a postposition would presumably be like a preposition: a separate standalone word that coordinates things in some ways, only it comes after (post-) instead of before (pre-).

   Since possessive -'s isn't standalone, I wouldn't view it as a postposition. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 16:55, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

6. Oppose per Kwamikagami and Mahagaja. Came here to make the same argument. פֿינצטערניש (Fintsternish), she/her (talk) 23:19, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
7. Oppose I concur with the stringent arguments presented by Eiríkr Útlendi in the above section. I would hardly endorse the aforewritten confidence regarding editors of Romance languages self-restraining themselves from making use of a universally permitted part of speech (clitic, in the unfortunate eventuality that this proposal is accepted). Much more conducive to an accessible and coherent (cf. the incoherent designations in the Finnish -kaan pointed out above) description of languages would be to allow it as an exception only for those languages where suffix, conjunction (-que), particle etc. are doubtlessly inappropriate designations. Bogorm converſation 17:55, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

   @AG202: (Having to revote every time a new language community needs to use the term is extremely unnecessary.) This suggestion implying the needlessness of votes performed by the knowledgeable contributors of a certain new language regarding which parts of speech would be most admissible, descriptive and unambiguous for that language sounds utterly disconcerting. If patronisation is to be posited at all, it is nowhere near where Al-Muqanna presumed it (in his comment from 3 April 2023), but rather in promoting a more restrictive approach for votes regarding the layout of lemmata of new, hitherto underrepresented, languages. Bogorm converſation 17:55, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

8. Oppose, agreeing with the "no adequate use case" statement above. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 12:13, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

1. Abstain Clitics are already covered by "Circumfix, Combining form, Infix, Interfix, Prefix, Root, Suffix". Entries should be categorized precisely according to whether the clitic goes, not just as "clitics." Adding "clitic" would cause as much duplication as allowing "Verb form" prohibited in that list in addition to the current "verb" heading. I edited the pages given as examples from "clitic" to "suffix" as per WT:BOLD. Daniel.z.tg (talk) 04:10, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

   @Daniel.z.tg: A clitic is not the same as a suffix. Let's take Ingrian as an example - I'm sure that there are languages that are even better examples, but it's the one I'm most familiar with and it'll do:

   -kas is a suffix: It has a fixed number of POSs that it can attach to (nouns), and is used to derive adjectives. The main parts here is that it's used for derivation, and it has a limited amount of POSs it can attach to, and can only be added to certain forms (usually the oblique stem).

   -kaa is a clitic: It can be used on any word, and it is not used to derive anything, but is rather a word of its own that is not written separately nor has stress. You could say (ei) miäkää ("not even I", pronoun), (ei) söövväkää ("not even eat", verb), (ei) hyväkää ("not even good", adjective), (ei) täälkää ("not even here", adverb), (ei) ... päälkää ("not even on ...", postposition), (ei) töötäkää ("not even work", noun in the partitive), (ei) töönkää ("not even of work", noun in the genitive), etc. etc. It's a completely different thing! Thadh (talk) 08:46, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

   @Thadh: Never mind. I misread the page for clitic. w:Clitic also supports you.

   So is -kaa just like -que? SPQR treats the -que as a word of its own. In that entry, the POS is "conjunction" not "clitic". If this vote passes, should -que also be changed from "conjunction" to "clitic"? Daniel.z.tg (talk) 01:56, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

   @Daniel.z.tg: I guess this is very language-specific. In Ingrian, clitics like this are particles in function, and labeling them as "particle" seems inadequate (to me). I would imagine that Latin -que might also be different from a conjunction proper (since it adds a specific emphasis on the preceding word: "Senatusque Populus Romanus" means something slightly different). But as I said, this is very language-specific and I would let the Latin editing community decide how to best analyse this word. Thadh (talk) 08:59, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

2. Abstain. On one hand, a lot of unrelated languages currently de facto use this POS header, which suggests there is some need for it, and a heavy-handed total ban from on high is unlikely to have considered every individual language's individual circumstances. On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to the argument that many languages are better off labelling things as e.g. suffixes and then tagging them as clitics with something like {{tlb}} or {{q}}, like -que. - -sche (discuss) 01:51, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

No consensus 13-8-2. Thadh (talk) 07:01, 1 May 2023 (UTC)