Is Basque an Agglutinative Language? A Proposal for the Diachrony of Nominal Morphology

Abstract

The title of this paper is reminiscent of de Rijk’s (1969) “Is Basque an SOV language?”. This SOV pattern, together with agglutination and ergativity are maybe the most characteristic features of Basque, or at least the most often mentioned ones. In this article, I will look at agglutination; whereas de Rijk dealt with word order issues from a synchronic point of view, I will deal with agglutination in diachronic terms. To that extent, both works only share the similarity of titles and the interest for labels that are typically used for Basque.