In the literature on Tupi-Guarani languages (a sub-branch of the Tupian family, one of the largest linguistic groupings in South America), a certain phenomenon has received a lot of attention from descriptive linguists: the so-called "relational prefixes", which act as linking elements between a head and a modifier (e.g., possessor-possessum, object-verb, argument-postposition). They have been typically treated as independent morphemes that mark the existence of a dependency relation between these elements. In this talk, the result of current diachronic research on these elements is described, leading up to the conclusion that, originally, they were not independent elements, but merely the result of sandhi rules applying to a certain initial segment, here reconstruct as *T. This new protosegment, together with the aforementioned sandhi rules, explains not only the "relational prefixes", but also a number of other strange alternations at morpheme boundaries in other areas of the grammar of Tupi-Guaranian languages, thus providing independent support for this hypothesis. At the end, the possibility of "morphologization" of sandhi rules (i.e., the pros and cons of a morpheme analysis for the "relational prefixes") in the present day languages will also be discussed.
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