Page "Clitic" Paragraph 24

Although the term " clitic " can be used descriptively to refer to any element whose grammatical status is somewhere in between a typical word and a typical affix, linguists have proposed various definitions of " clitic " as a technical term.

One common approach is to treat clitics as words that are prosodically deficient: they cannot appear without a host, and they can only form an accentual unit in combination with their host.

The term " postlexical clitic " is used for this narrower sense of the term.