Anderson's
General Theory of Affixation incorporates the placement of clitics and affixes in one general statement of distribution. Both affixes and clitics may occur only before or after the head of the category it marks or before or after the peripheral element of its maximal projection. The head of a phrase is X; the head of a lexical item is its accented syllable. This means that a clitic may attach to either side of a minimal projection, a phrasal head, X, or to any item at the beginning or end of XP. An affix may attach to either side of the accented syllable or to either side of the initial segment or syllable of the lexical item. Anderson's theory owes much to Zwicky (
1977, 1985), Carstairs (
1981), and Klavans (
1985).
