Re: Pronoun Clitic Development in English?

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:

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".
.

  What I could see was probably an excerpt from:

|Nevis, Joel A., Brian Joseph, Dieter Wanner, and Arnold M.
|Zwicky (1994), Clitics: A Comprehensive Bibliography
|1892–1991, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

  Specifically, the chapter "What is a Clitic?", which describes
  "clitic" at one point as a kind of vague umbrella term,
  and I think it is worth a read.

  There is also "On Clitics" (1977) by Zwicky, which goes into
  detail about different languages, including English, treating
  some English pronouns (like "him") in "2.2 Second class".

Grimble Crumble <grimblecrumble870@gmail.com> writes:

In English, we see a roughly similar construction in forms like “I know
‘em.” The 'em here isn’t just a casual pronunciation of "them". Unlike
"them", "'em" cannot be used in isolation and never takes stress.

  In English, "'s" is probably the go-to example of a
  "real clitic". Based on your argument, "'em" would
  give you another "real clitic" in English.