Preverbal Uninflected and Underived Roots in Mapudungun. Wuno and Its Implications

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04869v2
• Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2026 02:34:05 GMT
• Title: Preverbal Uninflected and Underived Roots in Mapudungun. Wuno and Its Implications
• Abstract summary: This study examines the grammatical status of preverbal uninflected and underived roots in Mapudungun.<n>A diachronic corpus analysis spanning four centuries (1606-present) reveals that these elements exhibit three distinct profiles.<n>We propose a prosodic-orthographic hypothesis: apparent "variable binding" results from the fossilization of prosodic pauses transcribed by early missionaries as spaces.
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• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: This study examines the grammatical status of preverbal uninflected and underived roots in Mapudungun, with particular focus on wuno 'return/re-'. Through a critical review of scholarly classifications--auxiliaries (Smeets, 2008), modal prefixes (Longkon, 2011), and preverbal particles/complex verb stems (Zúñiga, 2006)--we demonstrate the limitations of existing frameworks. A diachronic corpus analysis spanning four centuries (1606-present) reveals that these elements exhibit three distinct profiles: stable V1 compounds (kim, shinge), volatile V1 rates reflecting orthographic shift (pepi, wuno), and a true particle (kalli). The discovery of V2 attestations for kim and kupa confirms their status as full lexical verbs. We propose a prosodic-orthographic hypothesis: apparent "variable binding" results from the fossilization of prosodic pauses transcribed by early missionaries as spaces, a convention later reanalysed by speakers as syntactic boundaries. The evidence supports Zúñiga's radical concatenation as the correct grammatical model, with implications for the study of languages with no pre-contact written tradition.

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