Linguistik-Klassifikation: Morphologie / Morphology
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An interesting couple: the semantic development of dyad morphemes
(2003)
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Nicholas Evans
- Most systematic discussion of dyad morphemes has focussed on Australian languages, owing to a combination of their relative prevalence there, and the development of a descriptive tradition that investigates them in some depth. In the course of researching this paper, however, I became aware of functionally and semantically similar morphemes in many other parts of the world, almost invariably described in isolation from any typological reference point. I have incorporated such data as far as I am aware of it, in the hope that a systematic study will encourage other investigators to identify, and investigate in detail, similar constructions in a range of languages. The current state of our research, however, as well as some interesting geographical skewings that I discuss below, such that outside Australia dyad constructions almost exclusively employ reciprocal morphology, means that most of this paper will focus on Australian languages.
