Parallel Development and Shared Innovation: Some Developments in Central Vanuatu Inflectional Morphology

Abstract

The patterns of root-initial alternations associated with a realis-irrealis distinction in verbs involving what look like oral-nasal grade alternations in many of the languages of central (and possibly also northern) Vanuatu have for some time presented linguists with difficulties in accounting for their distribution and behavior. These patterns do not appear to be directly derivable from an original simple oral-nasal grade alternation, yet the patterns are so widespread and at the same time so similar that it does not seem plausible to argue that these features evolved completely independently since the breakup of Proto-Central Vanuatu. This paper argues that there was no original oral-nasal grade alternation, but as a result of a morphophonemic asymmetry that had developed in ProtoCentral Vanuatu at the point where an earlier realis prefix came into contact with the verb root, the descendent languages were in a sense predisposed toward the development of nasal grade-like mutated roots in certain morphosyntactic contexts. The presence of this morphophonemic instability in Proto-Central Vanuatu and not in other members of the Oceanic subgroup would also account for the fact that the same developments did not occur elsewhere in the same way. The systems that evolved in Central Vanuatu were also subject to the pervasive influence of analogical pressure as morphological paradigms were realigned.