Diachronic universals and morpheme order in the Ukrainian synthetic imperfective future

Abstract

This paper treats the problem of possible correlation between the current order of morphemes in a word and the order of syntactic elements from which they evolved at some point in the language history. A well-documented morpheme formation, the Ukrainian synthetic imperfective future, is examined in the grammaticalization framework, and numerous attested examples from different stages of the change from imati ‘have’ to a future affix are presented. The history of this change clarifies the relation between a single case of grammaticalization and the syntactic structure of a language by showing that the position of the affix has never marked the typological category of the language.