Diachronica - Volume 33, Issue 1, 2016

This article describes the uses of the marker kɯ in Japhug, which presents many distinct functions, including ergative, instrumental, distributive, causal linker, manner linker and comparee marker in the comparative construction. A series of grammaticalization pathways, some of which have never been documented before, are proposed to account for the polyfunctionality of this marker.

Cappadocian Greek is reported to display agglutinative inflection in its nominal system, namely, mono-exponential formatives for the marking of case and number, and nom.sg-looking forms as the morphemic units to which inflection applies. Previous scholarship has interpreted these developments as indicating a shift in morphological type from fusion to agglutination, brought about by contact with Turkish. This study takes issue with these conclusions. By casting a wider net over the inflectional system of the language, it shows that, of the two types of agglutinative formations identified, only one evidences a radical departure from the inherited structural properties of Cappadocian noun inflection. The other, on the contrary, represents a typologically more conservative innovation. The study presents evidence that a combination of system-internal and -external motivations triggered the development of both types, it describes the mechanisms through which the innovation was implemented, and discusses the factors that favoured change.

The verb paradigms of declarative clauses in Unua (an Oceanic language of Malakula, Vanuatu) have a distinct Irrealis prefix b- contrasting with zero marking for the Realis. In relative clauses, however, the Irrealis b- contrasts with a prefix m- encoding realis interpretations. On the basis of comparative evidence, the synchronic m- prefix is a remnant of an earlier Realis *mw- that has become specialized for use in relative clauses. The diachronic loss of overt morphology in unmarked categories is not unusual. What is unusual in the Unua case is the retention and specialization of the morphology for the unmarked category in a sub-class of constructions, relative clauses. This paper sketches out the likely significant factors in the historical changes giving rise to the synchronic state. These include conditioned phonological weakening and effects of the salience of the m- prefix in the cross-construction noun modification functional role.

It has been widely assumed that the primary adpositions of modern Indo-European languages constitute a historically identical category, descending from the Proto-Indo-European ‘local particles’. I argue that this assumption needs to be revised, because a major branch of the language family, Indo-Aryan, possesses adpositions of unrelated origin. This is not only a question of different etyma, but the New Indo-Aryan adpositions descend from structurally different sources. The ancient local particles, as attested in early Indo-Aryan varieties, combine with local case forms and show a preference for the prenominal position. By contrast, the New Indo-Aryan adpositions descend from nominal and verbal forms heading genitives, and show a propensity for the postnominal slot. Thus, we are dealing with elements unrelated not only etymologically, but also with regard to their morphosyntactic distribution.