How pragmatic implicature can thwart a common grammaticalization pathway: From location to completion in Hurukui

The Papuan language Hurukui has two TAM-marking paradigms in which the lexicalverb khai ‘be located’ grammaticalized into a suffix marking perfect and distal past.This is typologically unexpected and requires an explanation. Both paradigms evolvedfrom clause chaining constructions, via intermediary auxiliary verb constructions. Thesemantics of ‘be located’ is not primarily responsible for the grammatical meaning.Instead, the semantics of the entire source construction, some of which comes from apragmatic implicature involving sequentiality, played a crucial role in how the perfectand distal past meanings arose. The purposes of this paper are to (i) describe themodern suffixes, differentiating lexical khai from its grammaticalized reflexes; (ii)reconstruct the source constructions and stages of change, and (iii) argue that thesemantic values that became the innovative TAM readings were not inherent to themorpheme khai, but arose via pragmatic implicature in a typologically somewhat raresource construction.