Abstract

This paper argues that two productive applicatives in Mapudungun, viz. -(l)el and -ñma, can be labeled benefactive and malefactive respectively, but only in a superficially impressionistic way. Based on a detailed survey of the literature on the language, as well as on synchronic evidence and some tentative internal reconstruction, I suggest that the yield of -ñma was originally probably neutral with respect to benefaction, and that it still is in some uses of this suffix. According to this account, the appearance of (l)el-applicatives (probably from elu- ‘give’ or el- ‘set’) gave rise to a privative opposition between the meaning of both morphemes with many bivalent predicates.