The morpho-phonology of affect; Mapudungun kinship terms then and now
Abstract
Most varieties of Mapudungun, the ancestral language of the Mapuche people (present-day Chile/Argentina), display a series of consonantal alternations that have been characterised as ‘affective’. I argue that productive palatalisation and dentalisation of coronal consonants can be usefully analysed as evaluative morphology, marking diminutives and augmentatives, respectively, where pragmatic readings outweigh any size-based semantics. More specifically, palatalisation is read as positive affect and closeness (cf. [naʐki] ‘cat’ v. [ɲaʃki] ‘lovely kitty’), while dentalisation evokes negative affect and distance (cf. [n̪aθki] ‘damn cat’). The patterns are still overwhelmingly productive, yet in some corners of the vocabulary we see lexicalisation, with coronals showing up mostly as palatals in the domain of kinship and endearment terms ([ɲuke] ‘mother’; [tʃaw] ‘father’, [maʎe] ‘father’s brother’). More surprising is the lexicalisation of a small subset of these terms with dental consonants ([l̪aku] ‘father’s father’; [pal̪u] ‘father’s sister’, [mun̪a] ‘cross-cousin’, [n̪an̪uŋ] ‘woman’s mother-in-law’). Engaging with the anthropological literature on Mapuche (purportedly ‘Omaha’) kinship structure, I propose these phonological patterns enshrine the personal distance which resulted from longstanding traditional patrilocal and polygamous family structures, a distribution confirmed by close analysis of these terms in the 400-year textual record.
Date
Jan 8, 2026 —
Event
Location
University of Konstanz
Konstanz, Germany,
