While engaged in helping rebuild a post-Napoleonic Prussia and Europe after his Roman years, Humboldt pursued several linguistic projects: a linguistic cartography of Europe applicable to other continents; initial analyses of Nahuatl; grammatical sketches of seven other Mexican languages; a programmatic comparative-contrastive statement of linguistics in “Essai sur les langues du nouveau Continent;” an in-depth analysis of Quechua of the Andes plus grammatical sketches for Araucano (Mapuche), Guaraní, and Muisca of South America; comparative studies of Aztecan, Mayan, or Tupian language families and linguistic areas; introduction to Massachusett, Mahican, and Onondaga grammars of eastern North America; noun incorporation versus polysynthesis; growing understanding of verbal morphology, including the zero morpheme; “inner forms” of American languages; attention to language contact and also to extralinguistic, sociocultural scenes and wider contexts as part of comprehensive descriptions and explanations of differences and changes in languages without literary traditions in substitution of historical records.

This chapter discusses argument structure alternations capitalizing on the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) notions of logical structure, macrorole and privileged syntactic argument assignment, and linking. A distinction is drawn between lexical and syntactic processes. The lexical alternations (for example, causativization and anticausativization) are often limited in productivity and serve to enrich the lexicon. The syntactic alternations (for example, passivization and antipassivization) are characterized by mappings between the lexical and the syntactic levels, and may play an important role in referent tracking or topic continuity.

Prototypically, the central participants of the event are packaged as the core arguments of the predicate. The information packaging of participants in events need not follow this pattern. The prototypical packaging represents the basic voice construction; nonprototypical packagings represent different types of nonbasic voice constructions. The basic and nonbasic voice constructions involve a system of strategies: nonbasic voice constructions are differentiated from basic voice construction to different degrees, ranging from just word order differences to differences in the type of argument phrase a participant is encoded in. Passive--inverse constructions are used for a P (patient-like) participant that is more salient than the A (agent-like) participant; differential object (and subject) marking are similar in function. Antipassive constructions are used for a P participant that is even less salient than a prototypical P participant, and that is expressed by an oblique argument phrase or an incorporated noun (if it is expressed at all).

This chapter considers the borderline between morphology and syntax and the ways in which morphology and syntax interact with each other. We begin with a look at the ways in which morphology can affect the valency or argument structure of sentences, considering passives and anti-passives, which decrease valency, and causatives and applicatives, which increase valency. We then go on to look at processes of noun incorporation and cliticization and at phrasal verbs, verbs with separable prefixes, and so-called phrasal compounds. The chapter concludes with alook at morphological versus syntactic (periphrastic) expression in English comparatives and superlatives.