The paper discusses cliticization phenomena as reflected in ancient Indo-European languages, especially those that retain archaic word order and/or offer valuable insights into the behaviour of clitics because of the nature of textual transmission (i.e. Ancient Greek and Vedic, which preserve the accentual behaviour of clitics and their hosts, alongside Hittite, Latin, Avestan, and Old Persian), the main goal of such comparative analysis being the reconstruction of the clitic syntax for Proto-Indo-European itself. The typology of different clitics inherited from the parent language is discussed first, while the second part of the paper is devoted to the question of the placement of enclitic pronouns, particles, and conjunctions according to what is generally known as Wackernagel’s Law, dealing, in addition, with the rules of clitic distribution and internal hierarchization in the case of complex clitic clusters. Special attention is devoted to rules of cliticization in syntactically modified situations, such as topicalization and focalization.
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