A Note on Morphological Changes in Kaxabu

Abstract

Kaxabu is an Austronesian language of Taiwan with fewer than ten speakers, all of whom are over the age of seventy and mainly use Taiwanese Southern Min in daily life. A number of morphological changes are observed. The affixes < in > ‘perfective’ and ta- ::: -i ‘hortative’ have become fossilized and have been replaced by other more productive lexical or morphosyntactic processes. Reflexes of the Proto-Austronesian monosyllabic suffixes *-en ‘UVP’, *-an ‘UVL’, and *-i ‘IMP/DEP.UVL’ have become clitics while the disyllabic prefixes pa-ka- ‘CAUS (STAT)’ (reconstructed at the PAN level as *pa-ka-) and ma-ti- ‘wear (AV)’ now also occur as (function/content) words paka ‘cause, make’ and mati ‘wear’. The aim of this paper is to examine these morphological changes, and more specifically, affix fossilization, which constitutes the last step of grammaticalization in paradigmaticity and deaffixation, which is an instance of degrammaticalization. These two processes are quite opposite and result from two concomitant factors which are causing language change: (i) language obsolescence, which induces fossilization, and (ii) language contact with Taiwanese Southern Min, which causes deaffixation. Based on these findings, we demonstrate that Kaxabu uses syntactic processes more, and morphological processes less than other Formosan languages, and that it is changing from an agglutinating language to a more isolating language.