Clitics Versus Other Words

All lexical items in the corpora were coded as clitics or non-clitics according to the following definition, which was adopted for the purpose of distinguishing vowels whose phonological category is variable or uncertain from those which are more clear. This classification becomes useful later when the phonological variability of clitic words becomes an impediment to the analysis; clitic words items can then be excluded from the analysis.

Clitics are monosyllabic, closed-class words which are capable of having completely reduced vowels. For present purposes, the class of clitics was defined as the set of typically unstressed and monosyllabic grammatical words, plus added contractions. These are pronouns (optionally plus contracted modals: 'd 's 've 're); non-numeric determiners; and unstressed prepositions (stressed prepositions are not included, such as along, between, about, before, etc.); and forms of the auxiliary verbs be, do, have , will, and can (optionally +n't). It should be noted that, contrary to general opinion, negated auxiliaries (such as isn't, wouldn't, can't, etc.) reduce to some extent in some cases, since they are not always the focus of the sentence they occur in, and therefore they can also be questionable tokens. Thus I included them in this category of reducing forms.