A Typology of Relationalizing and Absolutizing Morphology in Lowland South American Languages

In many languages of lowland South America, nominal, verbal, and adpositional/adverbial stems are divided into two large classes, relational and absolute, according to whether or not they demand a complement in a specific position, respectively. After proposing a working definition of relationality with wide cross-linguistic applicability, we offer a typology of the morphological devices that convert stems from either of these classes to the other, surveying various parameters for describing such relationalizing and absolutizing morphology (RAM). These include directionality, productivity, pervasiveness of relational lability, existence of suppletive pairs, relationality preservation in derivation, and the possibility of RAM stacking. We observe that restricted relational lability is a strong areal feature in Eastern South America. Finally, we discuss so-called contiguity inflection, a category that has been proposed for a number of South American languages, and show that it is epiphenomenal and can be decomposed into RAM and person inflection.