Denominal affixes as sources of antipassive markers in Japhug Rgyalrong

• In this paper we describe the nominalization, denominal derivation and antipassive constructions in the Japhug Rgyalrong language.
• The antipassive in Japhug derives from the intransitive denominal derivation of an action nominal.
• The grammaticalization path action nominalization + denominal derivation is a common way of creating valency-changing derivations crosslinguistically.

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.