The Internal Structure of Local Case Affixes

This paper reports on a survey of 62 languages with complex local case morphology, drawn from 5 language families and several language isolates. The local case morphology of all the languages surveyed conforms, without exceptions, to the template in (1), as detailed below. This template shares with recent analyses of spatial PPs (Koopman 2000, den Dikken 2006, Svenonius to appear) the view that there is more structure than a simple locative/directional division (as in Kracht 2001). However, it differs from previous accounts, on the one hand, in rejecting the view that the locative is a subset of the directional structure, and, on the other hand, in positing a more articulated geometry, rather than a uniformly left/right branching structure.