Periphrastic pronouns in Wari'

In this paper, I argue that all demonstrative pronouns in Wari' are periphrastic "mixed categories," showing properties of words and phrases simultaneously. Wari' periphrastic pronouns appear to be transitional forms - new pronouns being formed. I discuss complex kinship terms, claiming that these originated in a way similar to the periphrastic pronouns except that the kinship terms have now completed the evolution from phrases to words. These findings have at least two important consequences for linguistic theory, namely, recognition of the paradigm as a primitive construct of morphology and support for inferential-realizational theories of morphology over "syntactic" morphology theories. © 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.