2421: Mesoclitics Aug 7, 2021

It is not difficult to imagine clitics—the shortened half of a contraction—at the beginning or end of a word, but they can also exist in the middle. While this is by no means the most common manner for a clitic to take, so-called mesoclitics are when the clitic is found between the stem (or 'host') and an affix. For instance, Portuguese and many other Western Romance languages will insert forms of object pronouns in between verbs and the verbal suffix, such as perhaps most prominently Portuguese:

"Escrever-te-ei uma carta" (I will write you a letter)

where the object pronoun 'te' ([to] you) is placed within 'escreverei' (I will write), which itself is made from the verb 'escrever' + the ending '-ei'. Here also, it affects the stress. It is also theoretically possible that having a clitic within a root itself exists, but reports of this are still novel. If confirmed, these would be known as 'endoclitics'.