On interpreting morphological change

In classical Attic Greek of the fifth century B.C. there are found sixdistinct forms of the reflexive pronoun one form for each of the three personsof the singu... » 

In classical Attic Greek of the fifth century B.C. there are found sixdistinct forms of the reflexive pronoun one form for each of the three personsof the singular and of the plural. This morphologically elaborate system iseventually replaced however by one in which there is only a single reflexivepronominal stem auto or its variant euto. In On Interpreting MorphologicalChange Woodard traces the course of this linguistic development through aperiod of approximately six centuries. An analysis of this prcess of morphological replacement reveals that the change is motivated by morphologicalredundancy and is sensitive to a hierarchy of grammatical relations. «