How the actional suffix chain connects Japanese to Altaic

Robbeets, Martine 2007. How the actional suffix chain connects Japanese to Altaic. Turkic Languages 11, xx-xx. In the much debated Japanese-Altaic affiliation question linguists seem to agree on at least one point: comparative morphology can contribute to unravelling the problem. The present paper studies verbal morphology. The aim is to relate Japanese derivational and actional suffixes to Altaic equivalents. The observation made in Johanson (1992: 2002) about the conservativism of the positions close to the primary stem is taken as a methodological prerequisite. By undoing the lexicalization that took place in the verbs of Old Japanese, an actional suffix chain is reconstructed. In the body of the article Altaic cognates are proposed for the reconstructed suffixes. The stability of the proposed cognates is assessed in terms of general cohesion and systematics, parallellism of combinational patterns, equivalence of the basic parts of speech, phonological correspondences and semantic latitude. Martine Robbeets, Seminar fur Orientkunde, Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat Mainz, DE-55099 Mainz, Germany.