Diachronica - Volume 40, Issue 1, 2023

Krongo, a member of the Kadu family (Nuba Mountains, Sudan), has four agreement classes: feminine, masculine, neuter and plural (Reh 1985). Nominal number-marking prefixes play a key role in class assignment: productive plural prefixes trigger plural agreement, and productive singular prefixes trigger neuter agreement. In most other Kadu languages, there is no distinction between plural and neuter classes. Comparative and typological evidence shows that Krongo’s system represents the older state of affairs. It is argued that the motivation for the merger of these two classes was a morphosyntactic abstraction over agreement rules. Two distinct rules, one for singular prefixes and one for plural prefixes, were replaced by a single rule that assigned the same agreement class to all productive number prefixes, regardless of whether they mark singular or plural. The result is the morphosyntactic mirror-image of an inverse number system, such as is found in, for example, Dagaare (Grimm 2012).

This paper presents new proposals for the reconstruction of Proto-Basque accentuation, as well as the development and chronology of the main accentual systems of the modern dialects, grounded in phonetic, historical and typological evidence. It is the first attempt to reconstruct Basque accentuation from a pre-Roman stage to the dialectalization that followed Common Basque. We suggest that Old Proto-Basque had prosodic prominence in the root, i.e., [(C)V.'CVC]. This system evolved into phrase-level prominence in Modern Proto-Basque, giving rise to unaccentedness in non-phrase final positions, with marked stress only introduced later, through Latin loanwords (2nd–3rd century CE). This would become the common system, which still persists in the west. Not long after the dialectification, word-level systems developed in non-western areas, first as peninitial and then as penultimate stress (in eastern dialects). Finally, we propose that the Goizueta prosodic system can be derived from the Central system, which is an alternative view to Hualde (in press).

Multiple exponence is a phenomenon in which morphemes that encode a given piece of information are realized multiple times within a single word. Unlike other members of the Siouan language family spoken across North America, Crow possesses a set of modal auxiliaries that display multiple exponence of subject person agreement. I show that one source of multiple exponence in Crow is the grammaticalization of the inflectional future from the motion verb arrive there, which brings with it its own agreement prefixes. Multiple exponence then extended to compound modals containing the inflectional future and finally to a morphologically unrelated modal – a distinct case of multiple exponence begetting additional multiple exponence. Thus, this study contributes to the broader understanding of the diachronic pathways to multiple exponence.

Competing schools of thought on the reconstruction of Proto-Austronesian stress contend that primary stress was either regular (falling on the penultimate syllable with possible phonetic conditions that triggered stress shift to the final syllable) or lexical (falling unpredictably either on the penult or ultima). In this study, I argue that the comparative evidence supports the first position: that primary stress fell regularly on the penultimate syllable and was not lexical. Further, primary stress was repelled to the final syllable if the penultimate syllable was open and contained a schwa nucleus. Three Austronesian first-order subgroups, Malayo-Polynesian, Western Formosan, and Paiwan, are shown to directly continue the reconstructed stress system of Proto-Austronesian, with stress falling regularly on the penultimate syllable but shifting to the final syllable after a schwa.

I also argue that the inability of schwa to hold stress is a result not of quality, but rather of quantity, as it is shown that schwa was a zero-weight vowel in Proto-Austronesian. Words with a schwa in the penultimate syllable, CəCVC, are shown to be sub-minimal, containing only a single mora. Daughter languages in Malayo-Polynesian underwent multiple cases of phonologically motivated drift, including consonant gemination, the deletion of penultimate schwa in three-syllable words, and vowel shift. These sound changes are argued to be part of a phonological conspiracy whose outcome is the addition of a mora to sub-minimal words. This study therefore offers both a reconstruction of Proto-Austronesian stress as well as a phonological explanation for these various sound changes in Malayo-Polynesian.