2006/12/15 by Mark Harvey, Ian Green, Rachel Nordlinger · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Australian Indigenous Culture and History #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Multilingual Education and Policy #Prefix #Suffix #Morpheme #Proposition #Linguistics #Demonstrative #Genitive case #Root (linguistics) #Computer science #History #Philosophy #Noun
paper · doi:10.1075/dia.23.2.04har
openalex publication_date 2006/12/15 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
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.