Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

*bi- SOURCE, INDEFINITE (“There is a … in …”)
*ba- SOURCE, DEFINITE (“The … is there”)
*ni- GOAL, INDEFINITE (“Here is a … for …)
*na- GOAL, DEFINITE (“The … is here”)
But, for whatever reason, the transfer of possession model began to break down and, as a
result, the two templates sketched out above, (75) and (76), began to diverge.
The BNBV inal predicate in (75) presumably maintained the possessive relation
between NOUN animate-e (GOAL) and the NOUN inalienable due to the requirement that an
inalienable noun must have a possessor. So the possessive meaning of the old locative
(GOAL) postposition in clauses such as (75) was presumably fairly stable due to its
inalienability. The template in (76), however, is another story entirely: with the
dissolution of the transfer of possession model in those cases in which the bare alienable
noun was indefinite (as in the alienable BNBV construction in [76]), the low source
applicative that had previously functioned as an applicative morpheme became causative
and the two locative arguments of the applicative were reinterpreted as participants in a
causative construction. The old locative goal argument was reinterpreted as causer
(presumably due to the semantic overlap between possessors and ergators), while the old
locative source argument was reinterpreted as causee due to the similarity between the
privative and adversely affected semantics of the source argument (BNBV inal) and the
characterization of a causee as the coerced or controlled participant in some situation, or
alternatively the association between a source or ablative thematic relation and
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