From prefixes to suffixes: typological change in Northern Australia

Title: From prefixes to suffixes: typological change in Northern Australia
Creator: Harvey, Mark; Green, Ian; Nordlinger, Rachel
Relation: Diachronica Vol. 23, Issue 2, p. 289-311
Relation: http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_articles.cgi?bookid=DIA%2023%3A2&artid=325086467
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co
Resource Type: journal article
Date: 2006
Description: This article provides a counterexample to the commonly held, if unexamined, proposition that morphemes reconstructed as affixes do not change their position with respect to the root. We do not expect to find that a proto-prefix has suffix reflexes, nor that a proto-suffix has prefix reflexes. In this paper we show, through detailed reconstruction, that paradigms of class/case suffixes in a number of Northern Australian languages derive historically from a paradigm of proto-prefixes, through the encliticization and reduction of prefixed demonstratives to nominals. This process has only left a few traces of the demonstrative stems in the synchronic forms.
Subject: Australian languages; diachronic morphology; Mirndi languages; nominal suffixes; prefixes; reconstruction
Identifier: uon:958
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/26595
Identifier: ISSN:0176-4225
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