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In linguistics, a clitic is an element that has some of the properties of an independent word and some more typical of a bound morpheme. Many clitics can be understood as elements undergoing a historical process of grammaticalization:[1] lexical item → clitic → affix According to this model, an autonomous lexical item in a particular context loses the properties of a fully independent word over time and acquires the properties of a morphological affix. At any intermediate stage of this evolutionary process, the element in question can be described as a "clitic". As a result, this term ends up being applied to a highly heterogeneous class of elements, presenting different combinations of word-like and affix-like properties.