In many Australian languages and other languages thereabouts, there has been a historical taboo against words sounding like recently deceased people. This has lead to great changes in vocabulary over short times, especially as loans have been a common way of solving the problem of taboo words. Apparently, tribe elders have planned ahead for the death of different tribesmen and women in at least some tribes.
Could a taboo likewise arrange for quick grammar change? I am not just thinking of replacing a morpheme with another, but of readjusting the use of a morpheme, the structure of a phrase, where markings go, typological details, merging cases, merging tenses, splitting cases, readjusting how the case-space is split, etc etc.
How would such a taboo work? Would something other than a taboo be better at achieving this effect? The social context in which I imagine this would be a pre-literate, probably even hunter-gatherer-type tribe. A larger community would probably not be able to keep up with the pace of grammar change I envision without a very efficient modern school system, and that's a bit beyond what I'd like for this.
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