The Innovation of Inalienable Nominalisers in Meto

Abstract

This paper investigates the diachronic origin and synchronic representation of inalienability in the Meto languages of West Timor, focusing on the development of two types of nominal suffixes. Drawing on comparative and language-internal evidence, it proposes that the innovation of an (in)alienable possession system in Meto involved i) the morphosemantic reanalysis of a situational inalienable suffix in *-k > -ʔ, originally developed due to contact with non-Austronesian languages, and ii) the syntactic Spec-Head reanalysis and grammaticalisation of inherited genitive pronoun enclitics into inalienable possessor agreement morphology (e.g. 3SG *=na > -n). The analogical extension of these two types of n head categorisers resulted in their semi-idiosyncratic use with etymologically *V# nouns, and also facilitated the aggressive resegmentation of etymologically *C# nouns, resulting in the illusion of productive subtractive morphology in the language.