Mapping clitics: from cartography to geography

The project will chart the behaviour of clitics across two linguistic areas, the Balkan and northern Austronesian, both of which display extreme diversity in their clitic systems, which in some languages have developed into argument-verb agreement. The aim is to understand the typology of clitic systems: when systems vary, which properties tend to go together?

To do this we will correlate the behaviour of the clitics with their distribution in the clause, both externally (What free elements can serve as the host of a clitic?) and internally (In what order do the clitics occur in a clitic cluster?).

Our choice of linguistic areas reflects our interest in understanding which properties are more likely to be geographically determined by contact (hence the Balkans) or to be genealogically inherited (hence northern Austronesian).