Denominal affixes as sources of antipassive markers in Japhug Rgyalrong

Guillaume Jacques (1)

1 CRLAO - Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale

In this paper, we review the documented diachronic pathways leading to antipassive markers in the world's languages and show that Japhug Rgyalrong, a polysynthetic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan family, attests a previously unreported source of antipassives. In Japhug, the two antipassive constructions (human and non-human antipassive) are built from the base verb through a two-step process: first nominalization into an action nominal, and second denominal verbalizing derivation of the action noun into an intransitive verb. Nominalization neutralizes the verb's transitivity, and a new transitivity value is allocated by the denominal prefix. A similar pathway is proposed for other derivations, in particular the applicative.

Mots clés: Antipassive; applicative; causative; denominal verbs; nominalization; action nominals; Rgyalrong; Japhug; Nahuatl; Eskaleut; Grammaticalization

Domaines: Linguistique

Guillaume Jacques. Denominal affixes as sources of antipassive markers in Japhug Rgyalrong. Lingua, 2014, 138, pp.1-22. ⟨10.1016/j.lingua.2013.09.011⟩. ⟨halshs-01244876⟩