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Transeurasian, verbal morphology, paradigm, paradigmaticity, allomorphy, shared idiosyncrasy, inheritance
Abstract:
This chapter starts from a point of consensus in the Transeurasian debate, namely that common paradigmatic morphology could substantially help unravel the question. It aims at giving an overview of the verbal morphology shared between the Transeurasian languages. In addition to regular correspondences in form and function, it argues that the Transeurasian verb morphology displays a certain degree of paradigmaticity, based on relationships of grammatical patterning among different morphosyntactic subsystems. Moreover, shared irregularities such as peculiar allomorphies and functional idiosyncrasies are taken as a strong indication of affiliation of the languages concerned. The chapter concludes with an assessment of chance similarity, leading to the viewpoint that it is more sensible to attribute the correlations in the verbal morphology to inheritance than to take refuge in non-genealogical explanations.
