Topic
morpheme with syntactic characteristics of a word but with phonological dependence on another word; e.g. ⟨-’m⟩ in ⟨I’m⟩ or ⟨-’ve⟩ in ⟨I’ve⟩; the possessive ⟨-’s⟩, the article ⟨a(n)⟩, and the infinitive marker ⟨to⟩ are sometimes considered clitics
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In linguistics, a clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host. A clitic is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the form of affixes, but they are distributed like function words.
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