Grand-daddy morphs : the importance of suffixes in reconstructing Pama-Nyungan kinship

There are many suffixes on kinship terms in Pama-Nyungan languages in Australia, some readily segmentable in the recent forms of the languages, some where the suffix may only be discerned by internal or comparative reconstruction. Among the most common are one which has been studies in a short article: -rti (Nash 1992) and another which has been mentioned by Harold Koch in writings and presentations: -ji/-ju. The latter has been thought to descend historically from a first person singular possessive suffix; the absorption of possessive suffixes, particularly first person singular, is a particularly common pathway of change, not only in Australia (Koch 1983, 1995, 2003a, b). Another pathway of change which has been identified in Australia and more generally is from a dyadic affix to a kinship-reciprocal affix (Evans 2003, 2006). The focus in the present article is on affixes which may have come from old inflectional and derivational paradigms, but which have become absorbed into the kin-term itself, rather than recently productive suffixes (such as number, gender, case or address/reference) although examples where there are productive paradigms are cited for comparison. Apart from those mentioned above, several other reconstructable suffixes of this type found in quite large areas of the Pama-Nyungan range are examined to see if light can be shed on their origins and distribution. This kind of morphological evidence provides particularly strong support for the notion of a Pama-Nyungan family.