Dispreferred structures through language change: the diachrony of affix ordering in Ancient Egyptian - Coptic

Given a worldwide preference for suffixes over prefixes, why do some languages nonetheless have a macro-preference for prefixes? In this talk, we show that Ancient Egyptian-Coptic (Afroasiatic) shows a long-term diachronic macro-change from mixed suffixing-prefixing to an overwhel¬ming preference for prefixing. We argue that each of the micro-changes implicated in this macro-change are better understood in terms of regular changes at the level of individual constructions, via, e.g., grammaticalization, rather than in terms of a broad Sapirian ‘drift.’ Crucially, it is the particular constellation of structural features of the language at a particular moment in time, together with regular mechanisms of language change, that give rise to the cross-linguistically unusual ‘macro-preference’ of the language.