Consonant Mutation in Southern Oceanic

Abstract:Verb-initial oral/nasal grade crossover has been documented for a range of languages in central Vanuatu. But relics of this crossover are found elsewhere in the Southern Oceanic subgroup, including in high-level reconstructed protolanguages. At the same time, similar crossover occurs initially in nouns in a number of languages, as does fortition (distinct from oral/nasal crossover) in verbs. This paper documents these cases and shows how the presence of a preceding nasal-initial morpheme accounts for crossover, while reduplication seems to account for non-nasal fortition.