Volume 23, Issue 3 -

Murrinhpatha (non-Pama-Nyungan, Australia) is typologically unusual in having a single applicative construction with the semantics of source/malefactive, but never benefactive. In this paper I discuss the development of this applicative from an incorporated body part meaning ‘hand’. I show that the applicative developed from a reanalysis of the external possession construction; and that the applicative morphology developed from the incorporated body part, rather than from a verbal or adpositional source. This contributes to our understanding of the typology of applicative constructions and also highlights the value in exploring the complex verbal constructions of polysynthetic languages to inform our understanding of grammaticalisation possibilities.

Well attested diachronic sources for applicative markers are adpositions and verbs. Nominal sources are regarded as dubious, although nouns have been argued to have developed into applicatives in some languages (such as Murrinhpatha, in Nordlinger (this issue). In this paper, I argue for a previously unreported source for applicatives, by presenting the possible applicative function of the classifiers of Mojeño Trinitario (Arawak, Bolivia), based on a large corpus of texts collected in the field. While classifiers within verbs derive prototypical applicative constructions, they show unusual properties as applicatives, namely in their semantics. The applicative markers are selected according to the physical properties of the referent of the applied object, rather than its semantic role within the sentence. And although most of the classifiers show no similarity to free nominal lexemes in the present state of the language, the classifiers found in Mojeño Trinitario verbs are very likely derived historically from nominal incorporation, a typical path of development. Mojeño Trinitario data offer new evidence for the possibility of elements derived from nouns to be reanalyzed as morphological applicative markers.

Recent accounts on the typology of predicative possession, including those by Stassen, recognise a Topic Possessive type with the possessee coded like the figure in an existential predication, and the possessor coded as a topic that is not subcategorised by the predicate and is not related to any syntactic position in the comment, literally: As for Possessor, there is Possessee. The Asian region is explicitly singled out as being a Topic Possessive area. On the basis of a sample of 71 languages from the four main language families of continental East and Southeast Asia – Sino-Tibetan, Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai and Austroasiatic, contrary to these previous accounts of the distribution of the main types of predicative possession in the world’s languages, we argue that this area should rather be considered as showing a particularly high concentration of Have-Possessives, with the additional particularity that the verbs occurring in the Have-Possessive constructions in this linguistic area are polysemous verbs also used for existential predication. After briefly reviewing Stassen’s typology of predicative possession, we discuss his account of the Topic Possessive type and then present five arguments for considering why the possessor NP of the existential/possessive verb yǒu 有 in Standard Mandarin Chinese cannot be analysed as invariably occupying the position of a topic, and consequently, that the construction should be reclassified as an instance of the Have-Possessive type. In the final sections, the situation is examined for other Southeast Asian languages showing the same configuration for predicative possession and existential predication as Standard Mandarin, to the extent that data is available.

The present paper discusses the benefits and challenges of token-based typology, which takes into account the frequencies of words and constructions in language use. This approach makes it possible to introduce new criteria for language classification, which would be difficult or impossible to achieve with the traditional, type-based approach. This point is illustrated by several quantitative studies of word order variation, which can be measured as entropy at different levels of granularity. I argue that this variation can be explained by general functional mechanisms and pressures, which manifest themselves in language use, such as optimization of processing (including avoidance of ambiguity) and grammaticalization of predictable units occurring in chunks. The case studies are based on multilingual corpora, which have been parsed using the Universal Dependencies annotation scheme.