Patterns of Innovation and Retention in Templatic Polysynthesis

Abstract

Abstract Polysynthetic verb morphology can be extraordinarily complex, with interacting subsystems arranged in phonological and morphological layers, some of which are more readily transparent on the synchronic level. Historical-linguistic comparisons demonstrate that this type of structure can be surprisingly persistent across time, with slow phonological attrition being one of the primary causal agents. Metathesis and reanalysis of morphemes and morpheme positions was also noted as an important agent of change. This chapter examines what is known about the historical layering of two distinct, but possibly genealogically related prefixing verb morphologies: Yeniseian and Athabaskan, both of which have developed different strategies of expressing agreement with subjects and objects, layering these grammatical markers between lexical morphemes and markers of tense–mood–aspect. Phonological fusing of certain sets of adjacent markers renders the pre-root portions of both morphological templates particularly challenging for assigning morpheme glosses. Historical reasons for this evolution are identified and assessed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.