Differential argument indexing by means of affixes vs. clitics

This paper uses a typological database of 83 languages, which all have conditional indexing for at least one core-argument (S, A, and/or P). Conditional argument indexing (DAI) implies that the relevant argument is indexed on the verb under some conditions only (Walker & Van Lier 2026Walker, Katherine & Eva van Lier. 2026. A crosslinguistic study of conditions on argument indexing. Linguistics 64(2). 327–376. ). The type(s) of condition(s) vary across languages and roles, and often multiple conditions apply within one (sub-)system. This paper asks whether there is a correlation between the morpheme type (clitic or affix) and the type of condition under which DAI appears. We predict that clitics are less grammaticalized than affixes and therefore more likely than affixes to be conditioned by discourse-dependent information-structure factors like topicality. In contrast, affixes are expected to be more often conditioned by intrinsic (semantic) features of the argument, such as person/number/gender/animacy. We also expect that affixes are relatively more often than clitics conditioned by predicate-based factors, i.e. tense/aspect/mood/evidentiality/polarity as well as lexical properties of the predicate. We show that these predictions are largely borne out, but should be further inspected by a multivariate analysis of each individual index.