Applicative Constructions in the Northwest Caucasian languages Peter Arkadiev (Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany) Yury Lander (HSE University, Moscow, Russia) Irina Bagirokova (Institute of Linguistics RAS / HSE University, Moscow, Russia) Abstract: This chapter describes applicative constructions in the polysynthetic Northwest Caucasian languages, which are typologically unusual in several respects. First, these languages possess an extraordinary rich system of applicatives whose semantic functions range from benefactive, comitative and malefactive to fairly specialised spatial meanings. Second, the Northwest Caucasian applicatives invariably introduce indirect objects thus almost never affecting the ergative-absolutive alignment of core arguments and serving as important and often only means of integrating peripheral participants into clausal structure. We describe morphology, syntax and semantics of applicatives, as well as a range of non- trivial phenomena such as the semantically empoverished and morphosyntactically special “dative” applicative and the uses of applicatives in agent demotion and clause-combining. 1. Introduction 1 This paper describes applicative constructions in the Northwest Caucasian (NWC) languages. NWC is interesting and instructive for the typology of applicative constructions for at least two reasons: • these languages possess extraordinarily rich systems of applicative markers whose semantics ranges from the cross-linguistically common benefactive and comitative applicatives to applicatives with fairly specialized spatial meanings, and • the NWC applicatives differ from canonical applicatives as discussed, for example, by Peterson (2007) in many respects, most notably in that the syntactic status of the AppP in NWC is indirect rather than direct object and that applicatives serve as important and often only means of integrating peripheral participants into clausal structure. Applicatives in NWC languages are relatively well-described. This survey is based mostly on our own fieldwork, but we also use data from various other sources, in particular, Smeets (1992), Letuchiy (2009), Paris (1987), Lomtatidze (1976), O’Herin (2001), and Fell (2012). For the sake of exposition, we illustrate the system primarily with examples from West Circassian, a language for which we have more detailed data and can use large corpora but add examples from some other NWC languages to illustrate the parallel or distinct behavior. Whenever unmarked, examples come from corpora (Arkhangelskiy et al. 2018–2022; Bagirokova et al. 2020, Arkadiev et al. 2020, Panova et al. 2020), examples elicited or taken from other sources are marked as such. The structure of this chapter is as follows. Section 2 provides the necessary background on NWC languages. In Section 3 we discuss morphological and syntactic aspects of applicative constructions in these languages. Section 4 is devoted to the semantic diversity of 1 The first and the second authors contributed to writing up the main text, while all authors are responsible for collecting and analyzing the data presented here. We thank all our consultants for their generous help and the editors of the volume for their invitation, patience, useful comments and meticulous editing. All errors are ours.