Enclitic
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enclitic
Enclitics are reduced or contracted forms of words. They are attached to the word that precedes them by an apostrophe, and they are dependent on that word for their meaning.
Enclitics generally consist of just one consonant sound and cannot stand on their own. In English, they are usually the unstressed forms of functional words such as auxiliary verbs, determiners, participles, and pronouns. As such, they have grammatical rather than lexical meaning (compared with suffixes, which create new words through inflection).
Enclitic
an unstressed word that in speech becomes attached to the previous stressed word. The two words together form an accentual unit, or phonetic word. The most common enclitics in Russian are particles, such as by, zhe, -ka, li, and -to, as in gdé-by and ddi-ka. Pronouns, nouns, and verbs, depending on the context, can also function as enclitics, as in the sentence Gdé byl étot chelovék? (“Where was that man?”)