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The term finite morphology corresponds to the morphological expression of person and number and of tense, mood, and aspect in the verb. In Romance languages, these features are typically expressed “synthetically,” that is, in single word forms. These latter generally comprise a ‘root’, usually leftmost in the word, which conveys the lexical meaning of the verb, and material to the right of the root which conveys most of the grammatical meaning. But lexical and grammatical information is also characteristically ‘compressed’, or ‘conflated’ within the word, in that it can be impossible to tease apart exponents of the grammatical meanings or to extricate the expression of lexical meaning from that of grammatical meaning. The range of grammatical meanings encoded in Romance finite verb forms can vary considerably cross-linguistically. At the extremes, there are languages that have three tenses of the subjunctive, and others that have no synthetic future-tense form, and others that have two future-tense forms or no (synthetic) past-tense forms. There can also be extreme mismatches between meanings and the forms that express them: again, at the extremes, meanings may be present without formal expression, or forms may appear which correspond to no coherent meaning. Both for desinences and for patterns of root allomorphy, variation is observed with respect to the features expressed and their morphological exponence. While some categories of Latin finite synthetic verb morphology have been entirely lost, many forms are continued, with or without functional continuity. An innovation of many Romance varieties is the emergence of a new synthetic future and conditional from a periphrasis originally expressing deontic modality.

Grammatical gender is a pervasive property of the Germanic languages. The typical Germanic gender system distinguishes three values: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The gender value of a noun is not expressed on the noun itself, but shows on agreeing words such as articles, adjectives, and a variety of pronouns. In all Germanic languages except for the two most conservative, Icelandic and Faroese, gender is distinguished only in the singular. Some of the languages have reduced the traditional three gender values to two. In most varieties, this involves the conflation of the historical masculine and feminine. In these languages, nouns denoting male or female persons appear with the same form of the article and other agreeing words. However, the personal pronouns often retain the masculine-feminine split. Some agreement targets have lost their ability to mark gender altogether. In the most extreme cases, gender agreement is limited to the personal and the possessive pronouns, such as in English and in Afrikaans. What gender a noun belongs to is regulated by assignment principles. Germanic shows semantic, morphological, and phonological assignment principles. In the more traditional languages, especially Icelandic, Faroese, and German, the inflectional class of a noun is an important predictor for its gender. The pronominal gender languages Afrikaans and English have purely semantic systems. This appears to be a typical correlation, observable in other languages. This article describes the gender systems of Germanic comparatively and points out interesting complexities that inform our understanding of this puzzling grammatical feature.

Biblical Gothic is the earliest Germanic language preserved in a longer text. The main source is represented by the Bible translation of the Visigothic Arian Christian bishop Wulfila ( born ca. 311, deceased ca. 382–383). Another few short Gothic texts are extant. For the translation of the Bible (ca. 350–380), on the basis of a Greek text, Wulfila invented his own alphabet (called Wulfila’s alphabet), using the Greek alphabet as model, with the addition of Latin and runic characters. Several manuscripts (5th/6th century; the most famous is the Uppsala Codex argenteus) contain the greater part of the New Testament. In spite of its fragmentary documentation, Gothic represents without doubt an important basis for the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic, because it offers—due to its early attestation—very archaic features in all areas of its grammar in comparison with the other old Germanic languages, the documentation of which began some centuries later. Gothic also shows recent innovations (especially the almost complete elimination of the effects of Verner’s Law within the strong verbs). The position of Gothic within the other Germanic subgroups, North and West Germanic, is still a matter of controversial discussion. Whereas older research stressed the correspondences between Gothic and North Germanic and, therefore, favored a closer relationship between them, postulating a subgroup Goto-Nordic, currently, a subgrouping into Northwest Germanic on the one hand and East Germanic (with Gothic as the most important representative) one the other hand is preferred, although this model also leaves open a couple of questions, giving impetus to further research. Other varieties of East Germanic are runic epigraphic texts (less than 10, most of them probably Gothic) from the 1st half of the 3rd century until the end of the 6th century. One of them (on the Charnay fibula, 2nd half of the 6th century) is probably of Burgundian origin. The documentation of other EGrm (East Germanic). languages is very poor and consists almost only of a few names. Two short syntagmata can probably be attributed to Vandalic. Crimean Gothic, the latest attested EGrm. language, is documented in a list of several dozen words and three lines of a cantilena. Most attested forms seem to represent a late EGrm. dialect.

While in phonology Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA) dialects preserved the phonological system of Old Indo-Aryan (OIA) virtually intact, their morphosyntax underwent far-reaching changes, which altered fundamentally the synthetic morphology of earlier Prākrits in the direction of the analytic typology of New Indo-Aryan (NIA). Speaking holistically, the “accusative alignment” of OIA (Vedic Sanskrit) was restructured as an “ergative alignment” in Western IA languages, and it is precisely during the Late MIA period (ca. 5th–12th centuries ce) when we can observe these matters in statu nascendi. There is copious literature on the origin of the ergative construction: passive-to-ergative reanalysis; the ergative hypothesis, i.e., that the passive construction of OIA was already ergative; and a compromise stance that neither the former nor the latter approach is fully adequate. In the spirit of the complementary view of these matters, more attention has to be paid to various pathways in which typological changes operated over different kinds of nominal, pronominal and verbal constituents during the crucial MIA period. (a) We shall start with the restructuring of the nominal case system in terms of the reduction of the number of cases from seven to four. This phonologically motivated process resulted ultimately in the rise of the binary distinction of the “absolutive” versus “oblique” case at the end of the MIA period). (b) The crucial role of animacy in the restructuring of the pronominal system and the rise of the “double-oblique” system in Ardha-Māgadhī and Western Apabhramśa will be explicated. (c) In the verbal system we witness complete remodeling of the aspectual system as a consequence of the loss of earlier synthetic forms expressing the perfective (Aorist) and “retrospective” (Perfect) aspect. Early Prākrits (Pāli) preserved their sigmatic Aorists (and the sigmatic Future) until late MIA centuries, while on the Iranian side the loss of the “sigmatic” aorist was accelerated in Middle Persian by the “weakening” of s > h > Ø. (d) The development and the establishment of “ergative alignment” at the end of the MIA period will be presented as a consequence of the above typological changes: the rise of the “absolutive” vs. “oblique” case system; the loss of the finite morphology of the perfective and retrospective aspect; and the recreation of the aspectual contrast of perfectivity by means of quasinominal (participial) forms. (e) Concurrently with the development toward the analyticity in grammatical aspect, we witness the evolution of lexical aspect (Aktionsart) ushering in the florescence of “serial” verbs in New Indo-Aryan. On the whole, a contingency view of alignment considers the increase in ergativity as a by-product of the restoration of the OIA aspectual triad: Imperfective–Perfective–Perfect (in morphological terms Present–Aorist–Perfect). The NIA Perfective and Perfect are aligned ergatively, while their finite OIA ancestors (Aorist and Perfect) were aligned accusatively. Detailed linguistic analysis of Middle Indo-Aryan texts offers us a unique opportunity for a deeper comprehension of the formative period of the NIA state of affairs.

The Romance languages inherited from Latin a system of four inflection classes in verbs featuring a dedicated theme vowel (or its absence). The presence of the theme vowel in inflectional forms differs from language to language and from inflection class to inflection class. In Latin, the theme vowels are found in most forms; in Romance, their presence has declined but they are still featured at least in the infinitive of most inflection classes. Most Romance languages simplified the Latin system by reducing the number of inflection classes while retaining the class distinction by theme vowels. In many Romance languages, new inflection classes have evolved. The existence of verbs with a stem-forming augment is often described as a subclass in traditional grammars. But the augment appears in a well-defined set of paradigm cells warranting the introduction of a new class. In a synchronic analysis, French and Oïl varieties show mostly a distinction based on length of the stem or, from another perspective, pattern of syncretism as many forms are homophonous. This is partly due to the fact that some very frequent forms do not feature any longer inflectional suffixes in their phonetic realization (although these are retained in spelling). New irregularities in the stem found in all Romance languages suggest the emergence of an additional class distinction based on the form, number, and distribution of the stems. Morphomic patterns arose which may be interpreted as inflection classes. The most radical change took place in French: Some analyses claim that none of the traditional classes distinguished by theme vowels survives; only stem distinctions may be used to establish inflection classes. Other studies still assume theme vowels in French, at least with verbs ending in -ir in the infinitive. Suppletion or other processes may lead to heteroclisis (i.e., forms of the same verb pertaining to different inflection classes).

The Ibero-Romance-speaking Jews of medieval Christian Iberia were linguistically distinct from their non-Jewish neighbors primarily as a result of their language’s unique Hebrew-Aramaic component; preservations from older Jewish Greek, Latin, and Arabic; a tradition of translating sacred Hebrew and Aramaic texts into their language using archaisms and Hebrew-Aramaic rather than Hispanic syntax; and their Hebrew-letter writing system. With the expulsions from Iberia in the late 15th century, most of the Sephardim who continued to maintain their Iberian-origin language resettled in the Ottoman Empire, with smaller numbers in North Africa and Italy. Their forced migration, and perhaps a conscious choice, essentially disconnected the Sephardim from the Spanish language as it developed in Iberia and Latin America, causing their language—which they came to call laðino ‘Romance’, ʤuðezmo or ʤuðjó ‘Jewish, Judezmo’, and more recently (ʤudeo)espaɲol ‘Judeo-Spanish’—to appear archaic when compared with modern Spanish. In their new locales the Sephardim developed the Hispanic component of their language along independent lines, resulting in further differentiation from Spanish. Divergence was intensified through borrowing from contact languages of the Ottoman Empire such as Turkish, Greek, and South Slavic. Especially from the late 18th century, factors such as the colonializing interests of France, Italy, and Austro-Hungary in the region led to considerable influence of their languages on Judezmo. In the 19th century, the dismemberment of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and their replacement by highly nationalistic states resulted in a massive language shift to the local languages; that factor, followed by large speech-population losses during World War II and immigration to countries stressing linguistic homogeneity, have in recent years made Judezmo an endangered language.

The Kiowa-Tanoan family is a small group of Native American languages of the Plains and pueblo Southwest. It comprises Kiowa, of the eponymous Plains tribe, and the pueblo-based Tanoan languages, Jemez (Towa), Tewa, and Northern and Southern Tiwa. These free-word-order languages display a number of typologically unusual characteristics that have rightly attracted attention within a range of subdisciplines and theories. One word of Taos (my construction based on Kontak and Kunkel’s work) illustrates. In tóm-múlu-wia ‘I gave him/her a drum,’ the verb wia ‘gave’ obligatorily incorporates its object, múlu ‘drum.’ The agreement prefix tóm encodes not only object number, but identities of agent and recipient as first and third singular, respectively, and this all in a single syllable. Moreover, the object number here is not singular, but “inverse”: singular for some nouns, plural for others (tóm-músi-wia only has the plural object reading ‘I gave him/her cats’). This article presents a comparative overview of the three areas just illustrated: from morphosemantics, inverse marking and noun class; from morphosyntax, super-rich fusional agreement; and from syntax, incorporation. The second of these also touches on aspects of morphophonology, the family’s three-tone system and its unusually heavy grammatical burden, and on further syntax, obligatory passives. Together, these provide a wide window on the grammatical wealth of this fascinating family.

Due to a number of unusual and interesting properties, Korean phonetics and phonology have been generating productive discussion within modern linguistic theories, starting from structuralism, moving to classical generative grammar, and more recently to post-generative frameworks of Autosegmental Theory, Government Phonology, Optimality Theory, and others. In addition, it has been discovered that a description of important issues of phonology cannot be properly made without referring to the interface between phonetics and phonology on the one hand, and phonology and morpho-syntax on the other. Some phonological issues from Standard Korean are still under debate and will likely be of value in helping to elucidate universal phonological properties with regard to phonation contrast, vowel and consonant inventories, consonantal markedness, and the motivation for prosodic organization in the lexicon.

As might be expected from the difficulty of traversing it, the Sahara Desert has been a fairly effective barrier to direct contact between its two edges; trans-Saharan language contact is limited to the borrowing of non-core vocabulary, minimal from south to north and mostly mediated by education from north to south. Its own inhabitants, however, are necessarily accustomed to travelling desert spaces, and contact between languages within the Sahara has often accordingly had a much greater impact. Several peripheral Arabic varieties of the Sahara retain morphology as well as vocabulary from the languages spoken by their speakers’ ancestors, in particular Berber in the southwest and Beja in the southeast; the same is true of at least one Saharan Hausa variety. The Berber languages of the northern Sahara have in turn been deeply affected by centuries of bilingualism in Arabic, borrowing core vocabulary and some aspects of morphology and syntax. The Northern Songhay languages of the central Sahara have been even more profoundly affected by a history of multilingualism and language shift involving Tuareg, Songhay, Arabic, and other Berber languages, much of which remains to be unraveled. These languages have borrowed so extensively that they retain barely a few hundred core words of Songhay vocabulary; those loans have not only introduced new morphology but in some cases replaced old morphology entirely. In the southeast, the spread of Arabic westward from the Nile Valley has created a spectrum of varieties with varying degrees of local influence; the Saharan ones remain almost entirely undescribed. Much work remains to be done throughout the region, not only on identifying and analyzing contact effects but even simply on describing the languages its inhabitants speak.

This article provides an overview of language practices that have emerged as a result of technological developments related to telecommunications and the internet, primarily in text-based modalities, and discusses research into social media and online communication in Germanic languages. It begins by providing a brief history of the communication technologies and platforms that underlie computer-based communication (CMC), then considers language features common to text-based CMC modalities that have developed since the 1970s such as email messages, mailing lists and message boards, chatrooms, SMS (Short Message Service), instant message (IM), and social media platforms such as Twitter/𝕏 or Facebook. For text communication in these modalities, features such as abbreviation, nonstandard orthography, use of emoticons and emoji, and performative marking of verbs are common in the Germanic languages, and new discursive practices have emerged for use of the hashtag (#) and the “at” sign (@). The article then reviews some of the findings of research into CMC for English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, and the Scandinavian languages, noting the diversity of theoretical approaches and analytical frameworks employed. Selected focus issues are discussed, including ethnographic and interactive studies of Germanic CMC and approaches to the study of multimodal online language on video-streaming and -sharing websites such as YouTube. The article concludes by noting some desiderata for research into Germanic language social media and online communication.

Linking elements occur in compound nouns and derivatives in the Indo-European languages as well as in many other languages of the world. They can be described as sound material or graphemes with or without a phonetic correspondence appearing between two parts of a word-formation product. Linking elements are meaningless per definition. However, in many cases the clear-cut distinction between them and other, meaningful elements (like inflectional or derivational affixes) is difficult. Here, a thorough examination is necessary. Simple rules cannot describe the occurrence of linking elements. Instead, their distribution is fully erratic or at least complex, as different factors including the prosodic, morphological, or semantic properties of the word-formation components play a role and compete. The same holds for their productivity: their ability to appear in new word-formation products differs considerably and can range from strongly (prosodically, morphologically, or lexically) restricted to the virtual absence of any constraints. Linking elements should be distinguished from singular, isolated insertions (cf. Spanish rousseau-n-iano) or extensions of one specific stem or affix (cf. ‑l- in French congo-l-ais, togo-l-ais, English Congo-l-ese, Togo-l-ese). As they link two parts of a word formation, they also differ from word-final elements attached to compounds like ‑(s)I in Turkish as in ana‑dil‑i (mother‑tongue‑i) ‘mother tongue’. Furthermore, they are also distinct from infixes, i.e., derivational affixes that are inserted into a root, as well as from confixes, which are for bound, but meaningful (lexical) morphemes. Linking elements are attested in many Indo-European languages (Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Baltic languages, and Greek) as well as in other languages across the world. They seem to be more common in compounds than in derivatives. Additionally, some languages display different sets of linking elements in both compounds and derivatives. The linking inventories differ strongly even between closely related languages. For example, Frisian and Dutch, each of which has five different linking elements, share only two linking forms (‑s- and ‑e-). In some languages, linking elements are homophonous to other (meaningful) elements, e.g., inflectional or derivational suffixes. This is mostly due to their historical development and to the degree of the dissociation from their sources. This makes it sometimes difficult to distinguish between linking elements and meaningful elements. In such cases (e.g., in German or Icelandic), formal and functional differences should be taken into account. It is also possible that the homophony with the inflectional markers is incidental and not a remnant of a historical development. Generally, linking elements can have different historical sources: primary suffixes (e.g., Lithuanian), case markers (e.g., many Germanic languages), derivational suffixes (e.g., Greek), prepositions (e.g., Sardinian and English). However, the historical development of many linking elements in many languages still require further research. Depending on their distribution, linking elements can have different functions. Accordingly, the functions strongly differ from language to language. They can serve as compound markers (Greek), as “reopeners” of closed stems for further morphological processes (German), as markers of prosodically and/or morphologically complex first parts (many Germanic languages), as plural markers (Dutch and German), and as markers of genre (German).

This article provides an overview of the structure of the Luxembourgish language, the national language of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which has developed from a Moselle Franconian dialect to an Ausbau language in the course of the 20th century. In the early 21st century, Luxembourgish serves several functions, mainly as a multifunctional spoken variety but also as a written language, which has acquired a medium level of language standardization. Because of the embedding into a complex multilingual situation with German and French, Luxembourgish is characterized by a high degree of language contact. As a Germanic language, Luxembourgish has developed its distinct grammatical features. In this article, the main aspects of phonetics and phonology (vowels, consonants, prosody, word stress), morphology (inflection of nouns, adjectives, articles and pronouns, partitive structures, prepositions, verbal system), and syntactic characteristics (complementizer agreement, word order in verbal clusters) are discussed. The lexicon is influenced to a certain degree by loanwords from French. Regarding language variation and change, recent surveys show that Luxembourgish is undergoing major changes affecting phonetics and phonology (reduction of regional pronunciations), the grammatical system (plural of nouns), and, especially, the lexical level (decrease of loans from French, increase of loans from German).

Mayan languages are spoken by over 5 million people in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. There are around 30 different languages today, ranging in size from fairly large (about a million speakers) to very small (fewer than 30 speakers). All Mayan languages are endangered given that at least some children in some communities are not learning the language, and two languages have disappeared since European contact. Mayas developed the most elaborated and most widely attested writing system in the Americas (starting about 300 BC). The sounds of Mayan languages consist of a voiceless stop and affricate series with corresponding glottalized stops (either implosive and ejective) and affricates, glottal stop, voiceless fricatives (including h in some of them inherited from Proto-Maya), two to three nasals, three to four approximants, and a five vowel system with contrasting vowel length (or tense/lax distinctions) in most languages. Several languages have developed contrastive tone. The major word classes in Mayan languages include nouns, verbs, adjectives, positionals, and affect words. The difference between transitive verbs and intransitive verbs is rigidly maintained in most languages. They usually use the same aspect markers (but not always). Intransitive verbs only indicate their subjects while transitive verbs indicate both subjects and objects. Some languages have a set of status suffixes which is different for the two classes. Positionals are a root class whose most characteristic word form is a non-verbal predicate. Affect words indicate impressions of sounds, movements, and activities. Nouns have a number of different subclasses defined on the basis of characteristics when possessed, or the structure of compounds. Adjectives are formed from a small class of roots (under 50) and many derived forms from verbs and positionals. Predicate types are transitive, intransitive, and non-verbal. Non-verbal predicates are based on nouns, adjectives, positionals, numbers, demonstratives, and existential and locative particles. They are distinct from verbs in that they do not take the usual verbal aspect markers. Mayan languages are head marking and verb initial; most have VOA flexible order but some have VAO rigid order. They are morphologically ergative and also have at least some rules that show syntactic ergativity. The most common of these is a constraint on the extraction of subjects of transitive verbs (ergative) for focus and/or interrogation, negation, or relativization. In addition, some languages make a distinction between agentive and non-agentive intransitive verbs. Some also can be shown to use obviation and inverse as important organizing principles. Voice categories include passive, antipassive and agent focus, and an applicative with several different functions.

In the history of Brazil, Africans and their descendants figure prominently. In many of the country’s regions, they represented a majority of the population, especially in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. The features of Brazilian Portuguese are described and the possible links between the demographic makeup of the country and the presence of the features are explored.

Catalan is a Romance language closely related to Gallo-Romance languages. However, contact with Spanish since the 15th century has led it to adopt various linguistic features that are closer to those seen in Ibero-Romance languages. Catalan exhibits five broad dialects: Central, Northern, and Balearic, which pertain to the Eastern dialect block, and Northwestern and Valencian, which make up the Western. This article deals with the most salient morphosyntactic properties of Catalan and covers diachronic and diatopic variations. It also offers information about diastratic or sociolinguistic variations, namely standard and non-standard variations. Among the most characteristic morphosyntactic features are the following: 1. Catalan is the only Romance language that exhibits a periphrastic past tense expressed by means of the verb anar ‘go’ + infinitive (Ahir vas cantar ‘Yesterday you sang’). This periphrastic past coexists with a simple past (Ahir cantares ‘Yesterday you sang’). However, Catalan does not have a periphrastic future built with the movement verb go. 2. Demonstratives show a two-term system in most Catalan dialects: aquí ‘here’ (proximal) and allà or allí ‘there’ (distal); but in Valencian and some Northwestern dialects, there is a three-term system. In contrast with other languages that have a two-term system, Catalan uses the proximal demonstrative to express proximity either to the speaker or to the addressee (Aquí on jo soc ‘Here where I am’, Aquí on tu ets ‘There where you are’). 3. Catalan has a complex system of clitic pronouns (or weak object pronouns) which may vary in form according to the point of contact with the verb, proclitically or enclitically; e.g., the singular masculine accusative clitic can have two syllabic forms (el and lo) and an asyllabic one (l’ or ‘l): El saludo ‘I am greeting him’, Puc saludar-lo ‘I can greet him’, L’havies saludat ‘You had greeted him’, Saluda’l ‘Greet him’. 4. Existential constructions may contain the predicate haver-hi ‘there be’, consisting of the locative clitic hi and the verb haver ‘have’ (Hi ha tres estudiants ‘There are three students’) and the copulative verb ser ‘be’ (Tres estudiants ja són aquí ‘Three students are already here’) or other verbs whose behavior can be close to an unaccusative verb when preceded by the clitic hi (Aquí hi treballen forners ‘There are some bakers working here’). 5. The negative polarity adverb no ‘not’ may be reinforced by the adverbs pas or cap in some dialects and can co-occur with negative polarity items (ningú ‘anybody/nobody’, res ‘anything/nothing’, mai ‘never’, etc.). Negative polarity items exhibit negative agreement (No hi ha mai ningú ‘Nobody is ever here’), but they may express positive meaning in some non-declarative syntactic contexts (Si mai vens, truca’m ‘If you ever come, call me’). 6. Other distinguishing items are the interrogative and confirmative particles, the pronominal forms of address, and the personal articles.

The Spanish language, as it spread throughout Latin America from the earliest colonial times until the present, has evolved a number of syntactic and morphological configurations that depart from the Iberian Peninsula inheritance. One of the tasks of Spanish variational studies is to search for the routes of evolution as well as for known or possible causal factors. In some instances, archaic elements no longer in use in Spain have been retained entirely or with modification in Latin America. One example is the use of the subject pronoun vos in many Latin American Spanish varieties. In Spain vos was once used to express the second-person plural (‘you-pl’) and was later replaced by the compound form vosotros, while in Latin America vos is always used in the singular (with several different verbal paradigms), in effect replacing or coexisting with tú. Other Latin American Spanish constructions reflect regional origins of Spanish settlers, for example, Caribbean questions of the type ¿Qué tú quieres? ‘What do you (sg)want?’ or subject + infinitive constructions such as antes de yo llegar ‘before I arrived’, which show traces of Galician and Canary Island heritage. In a similar fashion, diminutive suffixes based on -ico, found in much of the Caribbean, reflect dialects of Aragon and Murcia in Spain, but in Latin America this suffix is attached only to nouns whose final consonant is -t-. Contact with indigenous, creole, or immigrant languages provides another source of variation, for example, in the Andean region of South America, where bilingual Quechua–Spanish speakers often gravitate toward Object–Verb word order, or double negation in the Dominican Republic, which bears the imprint of Haitian creole. Other probably contact-influenced features found in Latin American Spanish include doubled and non-agreeing direct object clitics, null direct objects, use of gerunds instead of conjugated verbs, double possessives, partial or truncated noun-phrase pluralization, and diminutives in -ingo. Finally, some Latin American Spanish morphological and syntactic patterns appear to result from spontaneous innovation, for example, use of present subjunctive verbs in subordinate clauses combined with present-tense verbs in main clauses, use of ser as intensifier, and variation between lo and le for direct-object clitics. At the microdialectal level, even more variation can be found, as demographic shifts, recent immigration, and isolation come into play.

The languages of Australia, generally recognized as falling into two groups, Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan, are remarkable for their phonological and morphological homogeneity. All Australian languages exhibit a range of suffixation for grammatical and derivational categories, typically with a high index of agglutination, along with widespread patterns of compounding and reduplication, in the latter case, often of unusual types. In some Pama-Nyungan languages, case suffixation forms complex constructions indexing multiple levels of relations within the clause and across clauses, including agreement of nouns with verbs for erstwhile cases which have developed into tense-aspect-modality systems. Non-Pama-Nyungan languages tend to have more elaborate verbal structures, including such features as incorporation of nouns and adverbs, cross-referencing of multiple participants, valence-changing morphology, and systems of noun class/gender agreement across the clause, typically of four to five classes. Many languages from both subgroups have complex predicate formations, which typically inhabit a region between phrasal and compound status. Finite verbs commonly inflect for a smallish number of tense-aspect-mood categories and can often be classified into a number of conjugation classes. Nouns by contrast rarely (if ever) inflect in patterns characteristic of declension classes in European languages. Words appear to be largely right-headed, based on the evidence of noun-adjective compounds. Gender/noun class systems in some languages have been co-opted by the case system to mark case relations, and in others to realize derivational meanings such as association or part-whole relations. Pronominal agreement systems in both PN and NPN languages can reach Baroque levels of complexity in incorporating distinctions based on social categories such as sibling, social category membership (such as moeity) and kinship. Bound pronominal agreement with a single argument is exceedingly rare: if there is a verbal or clitic agreement system, it almost always agrees with at least two arguments.

This is an overview of the major morphological properties of Austronesian languages. We present and analyze data that may bear on the commonly discussed lexical-category neutrality of Austronesian and suggest that Austronesian languages do differentiate between core lexical categories. We address the difference between roots and stems showing that Austronesian roots are more abstract than roots traditionally discussed in morphology. Austronesian derivation and inflexion rely on suffixation and prefixation; some infixation is also attested. Austronesian languages make extensive use of reduplication. In the verbal system, main morphological exponents mark voice distinctions as well as causatives and applicatives. In the nominal domain, the main morphological exponents include case markers, classifiers, and possession markers. Overall, verbal morphology is richer in Austronesian languages than nominal morphology. We also present a short overview of empirically and theoretically challenging issues in Austronesian morphology: the status of infixes and circumfixes, the difference between affixes and clitics, and the morphosyntactic characterization of voice morphology.

The Arawak language family is the largest in South America in terms of its geographical spread, from Central America (Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua) to as far south as Bolivia (and formerly Argentina and Paraguay). Within South America, Arawak languages are spoken in Lowland Amazonia and adjacent regions, covering Guyana, French Guiana, Surinam, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, in at least ten locations north of the River Amazon, and at least ten to the south of it. There are over forty extant languages and a few dozen extinct ones. The genetic unity of Arawak languages was first recognized by Father Filippo Salvadore Gilij as early as 1783, based on a comparison of pronominal prefixes in Maipure, an extinct language from the Orinoco Valley, and in Moxo from Bolivia. The limits of the family were established by the early 20th century. Proposals to include Arawak languages in putative macro-groupings such as “Arawakan” or “Macro-Equatorial” have proved spurious and unsubstantiated. The heritage of Arawak languages survives in such common words as hammock, hurricane, barbecue, guava, and tobacco. Arawak languages are synthetic, predominantly head-marking and suffixing, with a closed and historically stable set of prefixes—bound pronouns on verbs, the relativizing prefix ka- and its negative counterpart ma-. Personal prefixes distinguish first, second, and third person, and also impersonal and indefinite forms. Prefixes mark the subject of a transitive verb and of an intransitive active verb, and the possessor on nouns. In at least two thirds of the languages, personal suffixes or enclitics express the object of a transitive verb (o), and the subject of stative verbs (s o) or the subject of non-verbal predicates. A few highly synthetic languages (including those from the Kampa subgroup in Peru) employ suffixes or enclitics to cross-reference the object and also the recipient or an oblique. There is typically a number of locative cases which can be stacked in one word. The majority of Arawak languages do not employ cases for marking core grammatical relations. The only exception is Tariana, from the multilingual Vaupés River Basin linguistic area. Here, core cases were developed under the influence of the neighboring Tucanoan languages. Inclusive–exclusive distinctions were developed in Resígaro and Palikur as a result of language contact. Open classes are verbs and nouns; adjectives tend to form an open class, and share some features with nouns, and some with verbs. Verbal roots tend to be exclusively monosyllabic. Noun roots can contain more than one syllable. Derivational processes include affixation, compounding, and various kinds of reduplication. Just a few languages have single-word serial verb constructions. The order of suffixes within a word can be variable, reflecting the scope of the morphemes. Nouns divide into obligatorily, or inalienably, possessed and optionally, or alienably, possessed. Obligatorily possessed nouns are body parts, kinship terms, and a few important possessions, for example ‘name’ and ‘house’. If the possessor is not specified, these nouns take an unpossessed form marked with a suffix, also used as a nominalizer on verbs in many languages. Alienably possessed nouns take a possessive prefix and an additional suffix (chosen based on the meaning of the noun). Most languages distinguish masculine and feminine genders in third person singular personal pronouns, demonstratives, nominalizations, and also as agreement markers on adjectives. More than half the languages have complex systems of classifiers on number words, and also on verbs, in possessive constructions, and on nouns themselves. They categorize the noun in terms of its shape, consistency, and animacy. Singular and plural numbers are fairly uniform across the family; dual has developed in Resígaro, as a consequence of language contact with the unrelated Bora. Other nominal grammatical categories include nominal tense, augmentative, diminutive, and approximative. The verb is the most complicated part of the grammar of every Arawak language, and the only obligatory constituent in a clause. Typical verbal categories include tense, aspect, evidentiality, numerous modalities (including a frustrative meaning ‘do in vain’), and valency-changing derivations—passives, reflexives, reciprocals, causatives, and applicatives. Some Kampa languages have up to six applicative derivations, including comitative, benefactive, goal, presential, separative, and instrumental. Highly synthetic languages, such as Kampa and Palikur, have patterns of noun incorporation. Many Arawak languages are located next to speakers of languages from other families. They take on their features, in grammar and sometimes also in lexicon. Tariana, the only Arawak language spoken in the multilingual Vaupés River Basin area surrounded by Tucanoan languages, has a distinct Tucanoan flavor to its grammar. Mawayana, Garifuna, and Palikur, in contact with Carib languages, have acquired a few Carib features. Resígaro has been affected by Bora, and Amuesha bears traces of contact with Quechua and other languages that are hard to identify. The interaction of genetic inheritance, language contact, and independent innovations makes Arawak languages dauntingly diverse.

The languages of the Austroasiatic (AA) language family share a core set of derivational prefixes and infixes that are largely fossilized. Beyond these, there is a wide range of morphological features throughout these more than 160 languages. Of the 13 branches of AA, there is a geographically central concentration of branches with predominantly isolating morphology (Khmeric, Monic, Vietic, and Pearic), while geographically peripheral branches have more complex morphology (Aslian and Khasic), and some with inflectional morphology (Munda and Nicobaric). Other branches are typologically between, largely lacking inflectional morphology (i.e., systematic, productive grammatical morphology) but having a somewhat more complex range of morphological features (Katuic, Bahnaric, Palaungic, Khmuic, and Mangic), including those with some grammatical functions. Other than Munda and Nicobaric, most AA languages have iambic word-level stress and have only prefixes and infixes while lacking suffixes. This has resulted in a collapsing of older morphological material, while new affixes, with new morphosemantic functions, emerge. Alternating reduplication, in which complete prosodic templates are copied but various segments are alternated, is a common word-formation strategy and sometimes combines with prefixes and affixes. While lexical compounds are common, so are pseudo-compounds with near affix-like semantic, and sometimes phonological, features. Overall, while monomorphemic words are common among the more isolating types of AA languages, ample linguistic descriptions show a substantially wider range of morphological complexity throughout the AA language family.