This paper deals with clitics and distinguishes between special clitics and simple clitics. Special clitics are those that combine the characteristics of the syntactic clitics and the phonological clitics. That is, they form a constituent with a host both in the syntactic and in the phonological tree. The formation of syntactic constituent takes place in the syntactic component at a certain point of the derivation before surface structure; the phonological constituent is formed by the mapping rules that create prosodic constituents, among others, the clitic group. These clitics have usually been called special clitics, and manifest a phonological dependency and behave syntactically in a different way than their strong counterpart. This type of clitics consists of the weak pronouns of Romance languages and Greek. Simple clitics are usually deaccented, sometimes phonologically reduced function words, like the French preposition de, the reduced auxiliaries 's, 'd, 'll, etc. in English. This kind of clitics does not seem to present far-reaching syntactic differences when compared to their nonclitic counterparts or equivalent forms. (English is, would, will, etc.).

In this paper, we will discuss the simple clitics that form a constituent together with a host only in phonological structure, but not in syntactic structure. These clitics have the same syntactic position and syntactic constituency as their nonclitic counterpart.

Section 2 is concerned with cliticization in English. Section 3 discusses the simple cliticization through the English auxiliaries. Section 4 concludes the paper.