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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Bua Group noun class system: Looking for a historical interpretation

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International audience; The way Bua languages express number on nouns mostly consists ofalternating suffi xes that bear witness of a former classifi cation system. However,Kulaal is the only present-day language where these markers are not frozen butactually trigger agreement with free, optional determiners that follow the noun andmay show some formal affi nity with its suffi x. For several reasons, previous attemptsat reconstructing a historical noun morphology common to all Bua languagesconsidered the sole suffi xes and neglected the determiners present in Kulaal. But,as is argued in the present paper, more recent data show that, in some cases, presentdaysuffi xes may result from the association of a former suffi x with an elementsimilar to one of the Kulaal determiners. In such cases the former determiner hassimply lost its independence and been historically stacked onto the noun form.