Page "Clitic" Paragraph 22

According to this model, an autonomous lexical item in a particular context loses the properties of a fully independent word over time and acquires the properties of a morphological affix ( prefix, suffix, infix, etc .).

At any intermediate stage of this evolutionary process, the element in question can be described as a " clitic ".

As a result, this term ends up being applied to a highly heterogeneous class of elements, presenting different combinations of word-like and affix-like properties.