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Part of
Insubordination
Edited by Nicholas Evans and Honoré Watanabe
[Typological Studies in Language 115] 2016
► pp. 209–246

Chapter 9. Insubordination and the establishment of genealogical relationship across Eurasia

| Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena

In this chapter, I investigate how our understanding of insubordination can add to the establishment of genealogical relationship between languages. The particular case that I deal with here is the longstanding affiliation question of the Transeurasian languages. The term “Transeurasian” refers to a large group of geographically adjacent languages, traditionally known as “Altaic”, that include up to five different linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic. Comparing the diachronic developments taking place on two sets of deverbal noun suffixes across these languages, I ultimately derive these suffixes from a neutral deverbal noun suffix proto-Transeurasian *-rA and a resultative deverbal noun suffix proto-Transeurasian *-xA. The comparative evidence indicates that these markers originated as deverbal noun suffixes, marking a derivational process at the lexical level, were then extended to function as (ad)nominalizers in dependent clauses at the syntactic level, and were eventually – through a pragmatic role in discourse – extended still further to mark finite forms in independent clauses. I argue that the sharing of these historical developments on formally corresponding affixes supports the genealogical affinity of the Transeurasian languages.

Published online: 18 November 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.115.09rob
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