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Consonant Mutation in Southern Oceanic
- Oceanic Linguistics
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 59, Number 1/2, June/December 2020
- pp. 232-268
- 10.1353/ol.2020.0012
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Verb-initial oral/nasal grade crossover has been documented for a range of languages in central Vanuatu. But relics of this crossover are found elsewhere in the Southern Oceanic subgroup, including in high-level reconstructed protolanguages. At the same time, similar crossover occurs initially in nouns in a number of languages, as does fortition (distinct from oral/nasal crossover) in verbs. This paper documents these cases and shows how the presence of a preceding nasal-initial morpheme accounts for crossover, while reduplication seems to account for non-nasal fortition.