In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic") is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host. A clitic is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the "form" of affixes, but the distribution of function words. For example, the contracted forms of the auxiliary verbs in "I'm" and "we've" are clitics.