The historical dialectology of stative morphology in Zapotecan

Bibliographic Data

ID22024276
AuthorsRosemary G Beam de Azcona (0000-0003-1383-1607, National Institute of Anthropology and History, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume13
Issue1
Pages115-172
Publication date2023-02-23
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Historical Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2210-2116 • E-ISSN: 2210-2124
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/jhl.21008.bea
OpenAlexW4292179703
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited29

This paper updates the reconstruction of the stative aspect prefix in Proto-Zapotecan as *n- and tracks innovations in stative marking. An early change is proposed to have deleted preconsonantal nasals, rendering segmentally unmarked stative forms of consonant-initial verbs in varieties of Zapotec then spoken in and around the city of Monte Albán. Contact with Chatino may be a factor in the retention of preconsonantal *n in Zapotec varieties spoken to the south. A fuller stative prefix, usually *na-, arose later from a grammaticalized form of the stative-marked copula ( Munro 2007 ; Uchihara 2021 ). *na- is more productive than * n- and provides the basis for a new proposed “Eastern Zapotec” genetic grouping. However, the isogloss for *na- crosscuts the earlier isogloss for preconsonantal nasal deletion, showing that any model of Zapotecan linguistic history needs to address not only divergence but also convergence. Ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence provide a social context to the linguistic changes discussed

Dialectology · Linguistic change · Linguistics · Prefix · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

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