Wackernagel's law

Wackernagel's law describes the tendency for unstressed clitics to occupy the second position in a clause or phrase, often after its first constituent.

Clitic: A grammatical element that depends phonologically on a neighboring word but functions syntactically as a word. Wackernagel's law concerns where these phonologically dependent elements appear.
Ancient Greek enclitics: Unstressed Greek words that attach phonologically to a preceding word, including certain pronouns and particles. Their distribution supplied classic evidence for second-position clitic patterns.
Jacob Wackernagel: A Swiss Indo-Europeanist and classical philologist who studied word order and clitics in ancient languages. His 1892 study gave the positional pattern its name.
Second-position phenomenon: A pattern in which an element occurs after the first unit of a specified grammatical or phonological domain. Wackernagel's law is one instance of this broader positional pattern.
Second-position clitic: A clitic whose placement is governed by the position of the first constituent in its domain. This is the element type most directly associated with the law.
Vedic Sanskrit accent: The system of lexical pitch accents preserved in the oldest layer of Sanskrit texts. Accentual evidence helps distinguish clitics from stressed words in early descriptions of the pattern.
Wackernagel's Law (1892): Jacob Wackernagel's study of the placement of unstressed elements in Indo-European languages. The original work framed the pattern through historical comparison.
Tobler–Mussafia law: A constraint in some medieval Romance languages that prevents clitic pronouns from beginning a sentence. It shares a positional restriction but does not require clitics to occupy the second slot.
Clitic placement: The set of grammatical patterns governing where clitics occur relative to words and phrases. The law is one recurring constraint within clitic placement.
Hittite clitics: Phonologically dependent elements in Hittite, often arranged in clause-level sequences after an initial constituent. Their chain-like placement is a prominent Indo-European example of second-position behavior.

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