Endoclitics and the Origins of Udi Morphosyntax

This title provides a synchronic description and analysis of a phenomenon that appears to be unique among languages that have been brought to the attention of linguists, namely the occurrence of endoclitics. It shows that syntactic rules must have access to the internal structure of the word. The early chapters of the book show that the morphemes at issue are clitics (as opposed to affixes), that the items inside which they may occur are words (as opposed to phrases), and that the clitics occur inside these words, under clearly specifiable conditions The diachronic second part of the book shows how Urdu came to be so different from other languages, and in this sense it explains the phenomenon.

Alice C. Harris received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University in 1976 and is Professor of Linguistics (since 1991), Professor of Anthropology (since 1992), and Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at Vanderbilt University. She is author, co-author, or editor of four books and numerous articles in the field of general linguistics. At Vanderbilt University she teaches courses on linguistic analysis, language and cognition,sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and historical linguistics.