The History of *=a

Abstract

This paper discusses the historical borrowing of an enclitic across unrelated Papuan languages spoken along the lower Sogeram River in the Middle Ramu region of present-day Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. The enclitic *=a, which attached to the right edge of a prosodic unit, was borrowed from the Ramu family into the ancestor of three modern Sogeram languages. Both morphological and prosodic substance were borrowed, as was the dual functionality of the enclitic – as a pragmatic marker in independent utterances and a linking device on dependent domains. We discuss the clitic’s formal and functional properties as evidence for its contact-induced origin and subsequent historical development in western Sogeram, as well as the implications of these developments for our understanding of morphological and pragmatic borrowing. The complexities of this borrowing event highlight the potential for theories of language contact to benefit from collaborative research on previously unstudied contact areas.