The Proto-Munda Predicate and the Austroasiatic Language Family (Preprint)

Self-archiving copy of the Author Accepted Manuscript

Rau, Felix 2020. “The Proto-Munda Predicate and the Austroasiatic Language Family” In: Mathias Jenny, Paul Sidwell, and Mark Alves (eds.) Austroasiatic Syntax in Areal and Diachronic Perspective. p. 198–235 Leiden:Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425606_009

The fact that most languages in the Munda branch of Austroasiatic have extensive verbal morphology has lead to the widespread assumption that proto-Munda itself had a morphologically complex verb. Pinnow (1966) as well as Norman Zide and Gregory Anderson (Zide & Anderson 2001, Anderson & Zide 2001, Anderson 2004, Anderson 2007) tried to reconcile the diversity of affixes and clitics and the abundance of morphological structures in modern Munda languages by reconstructing complex verbal morphology in the common ancestor. Reconstructions along these lines set proto-Munda apart from other Austroasiatic languages and from what we know of the history of the Austroasiatic family. Furthermore, a morphologically complex proto-Munda locates many crucial morphological developments in a pre-proto-Munda stage and has proto-Munda emerge as an exceptional Austroasiatic language apart from all other branches and with no explanation how and when it changed so dramatically.