Re: Pronoun Clitic Development in English?

Grimble Crumble <grimblecrumble870@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:

Does my theory seem correct?

  Yeah, your take lines up with what we see in linguistics.
  English, especially when folks are just talking casually or
  using different dialects, tends to have object pronouns acting
  kind of like clitics, similar to what you get in languages
  like Spanish.

  Still, English doesn't really have a full-on clitic system
  like the Romance languages do; it's more of a sliding scale,
  from regular forms to weaker ones to stuff that acts kind
  of clitic-y, depending on how and where it's used.

Does your English dialect show this change?

  I'm a native German speaker living in Berlin, so I don't have
  my own English dialect, but I can say that this clitic thing
  pops up a lot in casual English across a bunch of dialects,
  at least based on what I've read.

Have linguists written about this?

  In "Clitcs - A Comprehensive Bibliography 1892 - 1991":

|In English, various forms of auxiliary verbs have "reduced"
|variants that are phonologically dependent on the word immediately
|preceding them, as in "Your friend from Chicago's going to arrive
|soon", with a /z/ variant of "is" attached to "Chicago".

  .