The Proto-Munda Predicate and the Austroasiatic Language Family

Abstract

Introduction 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-protoMunda 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.