Volume 72, Issue 3 -

In Bagvalal (East Caucasian), native place names show strongly reduced morphological inflection. They combine with spatial suffixes identical to those used on nouns and spatial adverbs and with attributive and plural suffixes identical to those of nominal genitive and plural and thus have mixed adverbial nominal morphology. Place names are unmarked in spatial function but marked in argument position. To occur in the latter, they require a nominal head with an abstract meaning such as ‘village’ or ‘place’. Bagvalal place names are syntactically adverbs rather than nouns. Considering syntax and morphology together, they constitute a morphosyntactic class intermediate between nouns and adverbs. Mixed properties of Bagvalal place names are functionally motivated. Place names are, first of all, locations (hence spatial inflection), but also territories associated with specific ethnic and sub-ethnic groups (hence attributive and plural inflection). I conclude by briefly reviewing evidence from some other East Caucasian languages, to show that Bagvalal is not an exception.

This paper gives an overview of differential place marking phenomena and formulates a number of universals that seem to be well supported. Differential place marking is a situation in which the coding of locative, allative or ablative roles depends on subclasses of nouns, in particular place names (toponyms), inanimate common nouns and human nouns. When languages show asymmetric coding differences depending on such subclasses, they show shorter (and often zero) coding of place roles with toponyms, and longer (often adpositional rather than affixal) coding of place roles with human nouns. Like differential object marking, differential place marking can be explained by frequency asymmetries, expectations derived from frequencies, and the general preference for efficient coding. I also argue that differential place marking patterns provide an argument against the need to appeal to ambiguity avoidance to explain differential object marking.

In response to the typology of spatial interrogatives (Stolz et al. 2017b), the morphologically corresponding spatial deictic declaratives pursuant to the three basic relations place – goal – source are brought into focus for a comparison of both related paradigms. A canonical model (Corbett 2005) is applied to assess paradigms of spatial deictic forms. Logical outcomes considering all possible distributions of (a)syncretic patterns are discussed. To prepare our data for statistical evaluations, both parallels and differences between the two related paradigms are surveyed. Our corpus data is presented to outline what a typology of spatial deictic paradigms should encompass.

The paper argues in favor of considering the absence of material exponence (AOME) of grammatical category a morphological mismatch on a par with established categories such as suppletion and syncretism. It is shown that the phenomenon under review can be integrated into the taxonomy of deviations from canonical inflection as proposed within the framework of Canonical Morphology. Empirical evidence from eleven languages of different genetic, geographic and typological background is presented and discussed. Different kinds of AOME are identified. Their interaction with other non-canonical phenomena is discussed additionally.

The article deals with the notions of deaccusative and antipassive reflexives. The term ‘deaccusative’ is used in the literature to refer to what appears to be a derivation reflexivizing a transitive verb and replacing its direct object with an oblique object. The term suggests a unitary operation, and its function has been identified, in recent work, as antipassive. The aim of this paper is to show that, though some ‘deaccusatives’ are antipassive, the group of verbs sometimes referred to as deaccusatives is, in fact, a heterogeneous conglomerate comprising a few minor constructions but also pairings of reflexive and non-reflexive verbs that are due to alternations in argument marking with specific lexical classes or simply to diachronic accident.

In a numeral classifier language, a sortal classifier (C) or a mensural classifier (M) is needed when a noun is quantified by a numeral (Num). Num and C/M are adjacent cross-linguistically, either in a [Num C/M] order or [C/M Num]. Likewise, in a complex numeral with a multiplicative composition, the base may follow the multiplier as in [ n×base ], e.g., san-bai ‘three hundred’ in Mandarin. However, the base may also precede the multiplier in some languages, thus [ base×n ]. Interestingly, base and C/M seem to harmonize in word order, i.e., [ n×base ] numerals appear with a [Num C/M] alignment, and [ base×n ] numerals, with [C/M Num]. This paper follows up on the explanation of the base-C/M harmonization based on the multiplicative theory of classifiers and verifies it empirically within six language groups in the world’s foremost hotbed of classifier languages: Sinitic, Miao-Yao, Austro-Asiatic, Tai-Kadai, Tibeto-Burman, and Indo-Aryan. Our survey further reveals two interesting facts: base-initial ([ base×n ]) and C/M-initial ([C/M Num]) orders exist only in Tibeto-Burman (TB) within our dataset. Moreover, the few scarce violations to the base-C/M harmonization are also all in TB and are mostly languages having maintained their original base-initial numerals but borrowed from their base-final and C/M-final neighbors. We thus offer an explanation based on Proto-TB’s base-initial numerals and language contact with neighboring base-final, C/M-final languages.