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Hualapai is a Yuman language with a verbal morphological system, seen in various languages of the region, which poses difficulties for a compositional analysis. In particular, Hualapai verb morphology exhibits incrementality (see Baerman 2016, 2019, 2024), where there is no one-to-one mapping between forms and meanings. Instead, forms are ordered on a scale tracking morphological complexity, and more complex morphological forms are mapped, all things being equal, to meanings that are higher on some semantic scale. In the case of Hualapai, the incremental system concerns a plurality, which in this case conflates plural argument marking and plural event marking, also known as pluractionality. This paper provides the first compositional morphosemantic treatment of Hualapai verbal plurality, which in addition, is used to think about how we might handle such incremental systems in general using standard morphological and semantic tools.
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This content will become publicly available on August 26, 2026
Evolutionary pathways between applicative, causative, and middle
Abstract An infrequently attested pattern of isomorphism between markers of valence-affecting constructions involves overlap between causatives and applicatives, with a transitivizing function, and middles, which are detransitivizing. Such synchronic overlap must be due to some feature of the development of the constructions; however, so far there has been little detailed argumentation for directionality in such cases. We consider an instance of this pattern in the South Central Tibeto-Burman languages. The representation of multiple stages of the phenomena allows us to posit directionality and motivations for the evolutionary pathways involved. Here, the source morphology developed into a comitative applicative; in some languages causative meanings emerged, and in others, the construction developed an array of middle meanings via a portative applicative bridging context. The study provides new evidence for how patterns may arise in which the same morphology marks both causative or applicative constructions, on the one hand, and middles, on the other.
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- PAR ID:
- 10655212
- Publisher / Repository:
- John Benjamins
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Studies in Language
- ISSN:
- 0378-4177
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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