This paper accounts for the distribution of two second position effects, the V2 (verb second) order observed in continental Germanic languages and second position cliticization, attested in some Slavic languages. It shows that it is necessary to distinguish two types of second position effects: one of them affects finite verbs and pronominal and auxiliary clitics, whereas the other one is restricted to the contexts of marked illocution and is observed among a small class of so-called operator clitics. Furthermore, this paper addresses Bošković’s (2016) generalization concerning the distribution of clitics, which states that second position pronominal and auxiliary clitics are found only in languages without articles. This paper shows that although this generalization is empirically correct, it does not account for the distribution of auxiliary clitics and is not supported by diachronic considerations. It proposes an alternative generalization, which restricts verb-adjacent cliticization to tensed environments.