This book offers a comprehensive view of the morphology, syntax, and semantics of applicative constructions in Salish, a language family of northwestern North America. The historical development and discourse function of applicatives are elucidated and placed in typological perspective.

This book presents a state-of-the-art cross-linguistic survey of applicative constructions in the functional-typological tradition. An introductory section sets the terminological and analytical stage, presents the methodology used by the different chapters, and provides a typological outlook. The individual contributions address the morphological, syntactic and semantic variation of applicatives, as well as their discourse-pragmatic function. They cover all major language families and some isolates that feature some illuminating version of the phenomenon, paying special attention to language-internal variation and unity. The phenomena surveyed range from those instances usually considered canonical (valency-increasing, syntactically and semantically predictable, productive, dedicated, and optional) to those occasionally understudied in descriptive works and frequently neglected in comparative studies (valency-neutral, rather unpredictable, lexicalized, syncretic, and/or obligatory).

Preface -- List of contributors -- Introduction: benefaction and malefaction from a cross-linguistic perspective / Seppo Kittilä & Fernando Zúñiga -- Benefactive applicative periphrases: A typological approach / Denis Creissels -- Cross-linguistic categorization of benefactives by event structure: A preliminary -- Framework for benefactive typology / Tomoko Yamashita Smith -- An areal and cross-linguistic study of benefactive and malefactive constructions / Paula Radetzky & Tomoko Smith -- The role of benefactives and related notions in the typology of purpose clauses / Karsten Schmidtke-Bode -- Benefactive and malefactive uses of Salish applicatives / Kaoru Kiyosawa & Donna B. Gerdts -- Beneficiaries and recipients in Toba (Guaycurú) / Marisa Censabella -- Benefactive and malefactive applicativization in Mapudungun / Fernando Zúñiga -- The benefactive semantic potential of 'caused reception' constructions: A case study of English, German, French, and Dutch / Timothy Colleman -- Beneficiary coding in Finnish / Seppo Kittilä -- Benefactives in Laz / René Lacroix -- Benefactive and malefactive verb extensions in the Koalib verb system / Nicolas Quint -- Benefactives and malefactives in Gumer (Gurage) / Sascha Völlmin -- A 'reflexive benefactive' in Chamba-Daka (Adamawa branch, Niger-Congo family) / Raymond Boyd -- Beneficiary and other roles of the dative in Taqshelhiyt / Christian J. Rapold -- Benefactive strategies in Thai / Mathias Jenny -- Korean benefactive particles and their meanings / Jae Jung Song -- Malefactivity in Japanese / Eijiro Tsuboi -- General index (names, languages, subjects)

This book offers a comprehensive view of the morphology, syntax, and semantics of applicatives in Salish, a language family of northwestern North America. Applicative constructions, found in many polysynthetic languages, cast a semantically peripheral noun phrase as direct object. Drawing upon primary and secondary data from twenty Salish languages, the authors catalog the relationship between the form and function of seventeen applicative suffixes. The semantic role of the associated noun phrase and the verb class of the base are crucial factors in differentiating applicatives. Salish languages have two types of applicatives: relationals are formed on intransitive bases and redirectives on transitive ones. The historical development and discourse function of Salish applicatives are elucidated and placed in typological perspective.

This book is about recurrent functions of applicative morphology not included in typologically-oriented definitions. Based on substantial cross-linguistic evidence, it challenges received wisdom on applicatives in several ways. First, in many of the surveyed languages, applicatives are the sole means to introduce a non-Actor semantic role into a clause. When there is an alternative way of expression, the applicative counterpart often has no valence-increasing effect on the targeted root. Second, applicative morphology can introduce constituents which are not syntactic objects and/or co-occur with obliques. Third, functions such as conveying aspectual nuances to the predicate (intensity, repetition, habituality) or its arguments (partitive P, highly individuated P), narrow-focusing constituents, and functioning as category-changing devices are attested in geographically distant and genetically unrelated languages. Further, this volume reveals that spatial-related morphology is prone to developing applicative functions in disparate languages and phyla. Finally, several contributions discuss the diachrony of applicative constructions and their (non-syntactic) attested functions, including a case of applicatives-in-the-making.

Explores the cross-linguistic variation in ditransitive constructions, syntactic patterns of 'give'-like verbs taking Agent, Theme and Recipient arguments. This volume includes a typological overview of ditransitive constructions, the editors' questionnaire, as well as studies of ditransitive constructions in languages from all over the world.

This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.

This volume collects together core papers by Richard K. Larson developing what has since come to be known as the "VP Shell" or "Split VP" analysis of sentential structure. The volume includes five previously published papers together with two major unpublished works from the same period: "Light Predicate Raising" (1989), which explores the interesting consequences of a leftward raising analysis of "NP Shift" phenomena, and "The Projection of DP (and DegP)" (1991), which extends the shell approach to the projection of nominal and adjectival structure, showing how projection can be handled in a uniform way. In addition to published, unpublished and limited distribution work, the volume includes extensive new introductory material. The general introduction traces the conceptual roots of VP Shells and its problems in the face of subsequent developments in theory, and offers an updated form compatible with modern Minimalist syntactic analysis. The section introductions to the material on datives, complex predicates and nominals show how the updated form of shell theory applies in the empirical domains where it was originally developed.

The Routledge Handbook of North American Languages is a one-stop reference for linguists on those topics that come up the most frequently in the study of the languages of North America (including Mexico). This handbook compiles a list of contributors from across many different theories and at different stages of their careers, all of whom are well-known experts in North American languages. The volume comprises two distinct parts: the first surveys some of the phenomena most frequently discussed in the study of North American languages, and the second surveys some of the most frequently discussed language families of North America. The consistent goal of each contribution is to couch the content of the chapter in contemporary theory so that the information is maximally relevant and accessible for a wide range of audiences, including graduate students and young new scholars, and even senior scholars who are looking for a crash course in the topics. Empirically driven chapters provide fundamental knowledge needed to participate in contemporary theoretical discussions of these languages, making this handbook an indispensable resource for linguistics scholars.