Is Puyuma a Primary Branch of Austronesian?: A Rejoinder

This paper responds to recent criticism by Teng and Ross of a critique by Sagart of Ross’s claim, based on Teng’s grammar of Puyuma, that Puyuma has escaped the mechanism reinterpreting nominalization into verbs and should, therefore, be considered a primary branch of Austronesian. While acknowledging that Teng and Ross have presented an interpretation of the ‘do N times’ verbs that removes a part of the ground for the UVP *-en suffix being reflected in Puyuma, this paper details points in Sagart’s original paper that Teng and Ross have avoided in their response regarding Tsouic lexical innovations and fossilized *-en in two Puyuma verbs. It documents the existence of interspeaker differences in Puyuma sentences containing <in>, and argues that <in> in those and other sentences is a perfective marker of finite verbs under competition from la, a marker of new situations with perfective interpretations. Finally, it confirms the conclusion in Sagart’s paper that Puyuma has not escaped the reinterpretation of nominalizations into voicemarked verbs.