21. Shared verb morphology in the Transeurasian languages: copy or cognate?

要旨

The genealogical relationship of the Transeurasian languages is among the most disputed classifications of historical comparative linguistics. Rather than using the traditional term Altaic, the term Transeurasian is proposed in reference to a large group of geographically adjacent languages that share a significant number of linguistic properties and include at most five linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic. This chapter develops twelve guidelines that help to distinguish between the effects of contact and those of inheritance in shared morphology in general. In the second part these guidelines will be applied to the verb morphology shared by the Transeurasian languages. The borrowing of morphological paradigms together with foreign lexicon is a well-attested phenomenon in the languages of the world. Therefore, only shared affixes that can attach to native, unrelatable roots will be taken into account as genealogical evidence. Keywords:genealogical; Japonic; Koreanic; linguistic; Mongolic; Transeurasian languages; Tungusic; Turkic; verb morphology

主題