An attempt at categorizing clitics in an Arabic variety

Abstract The process of building a linguistic corpus involves a variety of problems when it comes to annotation. One of the notoriously difficult issues concerns the classification and annotation of clitics. The proposed solutions range from a general doubt about the need for a separate class of clitics to innovative categorizations, specifically when dealing with the affix-versus-clitic challenge. The present contribution aims at highlighting the problems that arise in this context by providing an insight into the creation of a linguistic corpus for a hitherto undescribed variety of Arabic within the documentation project The Language of the Arab Minority in Southern Iran (AiS) and discussing concrete strategies for solving them. In doing so, it adds to the literature on Arabic linguistics and to the general discussion about clitics by addressing a linguistic problem that has not been systematically investigated for Arabic.