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Reinterpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

John Haiman
John Haiman*
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba
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Abstract

A morphological peculiarity of Hua, a language of Papua New Guinea, is that object and possessive pronouns with a certain class of verbal and nominal roots are infixed rather than prefixed. This is shown to result from a combination of two reinterpretations, Watkins' Law and the analytic leap, both identifiable as instances of abductive reasoning. The Hua example is particularly instructive in showing how a change from prefixation to infixation, essentially a morpheme metathesis, could have occurred gradually, and in suggesting a systematic source of counter-examples to the putative universal that the order of morphemes in a word is fixed.

The mechanism of reinterpretation can, then, be described ; but functional explanations that have been proposed are only descriptions of tendencies—exceptions to which, though frequent, are unpredictable. The necessary motives of reinterpretation remain unknown.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , June 1977 , pp. 312 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by Linguistic Society of America

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