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.