[Lingtyp] Grammatcalization of 'road/way/path'.

[Jess Tauber]

In Yahgan (critically endangered genetic isolate, TIerra del Fuego) wa:
(colon marks tenseness of vowel preceding it) is 'way, path, road, trail'.
kvnda:m (v schwa) is 'the way or manner of doing something, how done'  with
an interrogative counterpart kunda:m 'how done, in what way, manner',. It
may be that the final -m of these two forms historically comes from wa: (or
wa: may originally have started with a labial nasal phoneme).

Jess Tauber

On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 2:10 PM Dmitri Sitchinava <mitrius at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear typologists.
>
> Me and my colleague are interested in grammaticalization patterns with
> nouns meaning 'road/way/path'.
>
> In Svorou (1994) various examples of grammaticalization into spatial grams
> are provided, but examples beyond the spatial domain are probably even more
> interesting.
> The pattern 'way/matter' is also well-known, but to give you a few more
> examples: English intensifier *way* too, French *être en voie de* and
> Swedish *på väg att* (~to be about to), German *wegen* 'because of'. The
> famous *way*-construction (*to V one's way*) is also worth mentioning.
>
> We would appreciate it if you could help us to collect more data so that
> we could get a more diverse sample and would not miss some potentially
> interesting patterns.
>
> Best
> Dmitri
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