Denominal affixes as sources of antipassive markers in Japhug Rgyalrong

Abstract In this paper, we review the documented diachronic pathways leading to antipassive markers in the worldʹs 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 verbʹs transitivity, and a new transitivity value is allocated by the denominal prefix. A similar pathway is proposed for other derivations, in particular the applicative.