This paper aims at showing to what extent the phenomenon of transcategorialisation has shaped the Mazatec IC system, more particularly as far as prefixal markers are concerned, from the standpoint of diasystem. For example, in the Huautla diasystem as described by Kenneth Pike (1948), the verbal form b’éñai ‘he/she buries’ is composed of two morphemes, b’é+ñai. This can be analysed as the association of the transcategorialised light (directional) verb b’é ‘to put down’ with the positional root ñai ‘to be sat down’. Through transcategorialisation, the verb b’é has been turned into a preverb. As time passed on, a high degree of complexity was supposedly introduced and developed between competing dialects in the Mazatec area, rendering the outer (interdialectal) and inner (intradialectal) relations more complex through centuries, as far as this system of compounding/inflecting verbal stems is concerned. Nevertheless, the story might be somewhat different, right from the beginning, i.e. starting during the formative process of Otomanguean subfamilies, and depending even more on transcategoriality as could be superficially suspected. Historical TAM prefixes and clitics would have been thoroughly reanalysed into compounding sequences, and reshaped into an IC system. Should this hypothesis be confirmed in further research, IC “taxonomisation” (in other words, the emergence of IC systems in natural languages) would therefore belong to transcategorialisation processes in languages, as a potentially universal process of grammaticalization and relexification.
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