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

Andres Chandia

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arXiv · 2608.04869

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

Andres Chandia

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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 (Z\'u\~niga, 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 Z\'u\~niga'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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Andres Chandia. 2026-08-05. Preverbal Uninflected and Underived Roots in Mapudungun. Wuno and Its Implications. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04869

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