Preverbal Uninflected and Underived Roots in Mapudüngun: Wüño and Its Implications

This study investigates the grammatical status of a specific set of uninflected and underived roots in Mapudüngun—such as wüño ('return/re-'), kim ('know how'), and pepi ('can')—that appear in preverbal positions. These elements have historically defied consistent classification, with scholars variously labeling them as auxiliaries, modal prefixes, or preverbal particles. The author addresses this by conducting a diachronic corpus analysis spanning four centuries (1606–present) to determine whether these elements constitute a unique grammatical category or if their behavior can be explained through existing syntactic models.

The paper proposes a "prosodic-orthographic hypothesis" to explain the inconsistent behavior of these roots. The author argues that these elements are not inherently special; rather, they are full lexical verbs that participate in standard V1-V2 compounding. The perceived "variable binding" (where they sometimes appear as prefixes and other times as independent words) is a byproduct of early missionary transcription practices. Prosodic pauses in speech were transcribed as spaces, which were later fossilized in writing and eventually reanalyzed by native speakers as genuine syntactic boundaries. This model supports Zúñiga’s (2006) theory of "radical concatenation," suggesting that Mapudüngun grammar is more consistent than previous, fragmented analyses have suggested.

The quantitative analysis reveals three distinct profiles for these elements: stable V1 compounds (e.g., kim), volatile V1 rates influenced by orthographic shifts (e.g., wüño), and a true particle (kalli). Crucially, the discovery of V2 attestations for roots like kim and küpa confirms that they function as full lexical verbs rather than restricted auxiliaries. This finding is significant because it demonstrates how orthographic conventions in languages without pre-contact written traditions can distort linguistic analysis, leading researchers to invent grammatical categories that do not exist in the underlying syntax.