A diachronic pathway from nominal to verbal inflection: Evidence from Australian languages

This paper calls attention to a diachronic pathway that results in verbal inflections (for mood, aspect, tense, or polarity) being cognate with nominal inflections (especially case). It is illustrated with data from Australian languages, whose typological structure includes the use of suffixes to mark: case relations on nominals, kinds of dependent clause relations on verbs, and TAM values on finite verbs. The cross-categorial correspondences described here are consequent on morphological reanalyses that follow from a sequence of two separate syntactic changes. The first change consists of the extension of markers of intra-clausal relations (case suffixes on nominals) to signalling inter-clausal relations (with case suffixes added to non-finite verbs). This is described in Australianist literature as the “complementiser function” of cases ( Dench & Evans 1988 ). The combination of markers of non-finiteness and case may then be reanalysed as subordinate verbal inflections (e.g. Kaytetye - nge-le non.finite-locative > - ngele simultaneous.same.subject ‘while VERBing’). The second change, insubordination ( Evans 2007 ), consists of the use of subordinate clauses as main clauses, with the reanalysis of subordinate verbal inflections as finite verb inflections in independent clauses. Five cases which illustrate these recurrent developments are discussed. Some of these relations have been previously recognised in Australian linguistics (e.g. Blake 1976 , 1993 ; Meakins 2016 ; Koch 2025 ), and their extreme effects in the morphosyntax of Kayardild have been described by Evans (1995) and Round (2013) . Here I present a uniform account of the diachronic chain of developments and highlight their relevance to historical morphology and the etymology of verbal inflections, as well as sketching some implications for their synchronic analysis.