There is not much point in proposing that cliticization is an ordinary syntactic operation, describable by the same formalism as ordinary syntactic rules, and capable of interacting with them; or that it is a type of affixation, describable by the same formalism as ordinary inflectional affixation, and interacting with other morphological rules but not with ordinary syntactic rules; or that it is a special type of rule to its own formal constraints and interacting with other types so as to operate on the output of syntactic rules as a group, and to provide the input for morphological rules as a group - so long as the evidence for the theoretical position involves linguistic units whose status as affixes, clitics, or words is unclear.
- Zwicky (2004), Pag. 351