Grammar from space – How spatial elements become applicatives (new sources, new data)

In this talk, I will outline the ‘Grammar from space’ project, which sets out to investigate how elements with spatial meaning develop into applicatives from a typological and Germanic perspective. Applicatives are morphological devices marked on the predicate that introduce a thematically peripheral argument into the clause, thus increasing the valency of the predicate. From a typological perspective, I will first review the existing literature on the sources of applicatives, and then present a case-study of a new source of applicatives, viz. spatial verb morphology, in Harakmbut, an unclassified Amazonian language spoken in Peru. My data collected in the field show that a set of spatial prefixes show three distinct uses, viz. valence-neutral spatial uses, valence-increasing spatial uses and valence-increasing non-spatial uses. These will be interpreted as distinct stages on a grammaticalization pathway from spatial, lexical element to abstract, non-spatial grammatical element, viz. an applicative. From a Germanic perspective, I will present the project’s research aims (the results are still to be obtained). We seek to investigate the well-established adposition-to-applicative pathway based on historical data, adopting a new, valency-centred approach to verb-particle constructions in Dutch and English. While existing accounts seem to imply that the adposition-to-applicative pathway always involves adposition stranding (i.e. the adposition not being adjacent to its nominal complement), the Dutch and English data show that this is not a necessary condition.