---
title: "Anaphoric clitic"
chunk: 1/1
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_clitic"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:32.777368+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In linguistics, anaphoric clitics are a specific subset of clitics: morphologically-bound morphemes that syntactically resemble one word unit, but are bound phonologically to another word unit. Anaphoric clitics are a type of anaphor, meaning that they refer to previously mentioned constituents. Anaphoric clitics thus fill a position in a clause that would otherwise be occupied by a noun phrase, meaning that they are in complementary distribution with full noun phrases. A sentence can thus either contain an anaphoric clitic or a full noun phrase carrying out a particular grammatical function, but not both.
For example, in the Yagua language, spoken in Peru, there is an anaphoric clitic sa which appears before the verb, in subject function: the verb can either have a full noun phrase subject, or the clitic sa. 


== References ==