(On reconstructing the verbal prefixes of Amurdak)

This paper examines the development of verb prefixes in Amurdak, an Iwaidjan language from Northern Australia. It tests the hypothesis of their genesis advanced in Evans (2000b). According to this hypothesis the verb prefixes of Amurdak originated in processes of lexicalization, in which formerly productive mrophemes, which expressed noun classes, became semantically bleached that then only marked inflection classes. This paper demonstrates that such an explanation is untenable, because if all the data is considered, there are not enough formal correspondences between the verb prefixes of Amurdak and the class prefixes of the other Iwaidjan languages. It seems therefore probable that a sizeable amount of the deviant features of Amurdak are in fact archaisms and that the other languages were innovative