ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the morphosyntactic features most regularly used in locative descriptions in languages of North America. The languages in our survey illustrate diversity in terms of how locative information is encoded, even when we compare across related languages. We also observe diversity in how different descriptions characterize what appear to be similar phenomena (e.g., adpositions vs. locative markers).
We begin our discussion by exploring how locative predicates are encoded, primarily as it pertains to verbal predication. Some languages, for example, make use of locative or existential verbs, while others have large sets of posture or positional verbs. We then focus on other grammatical elements that involve or are associated with verbal forms, such as preverbs, verbal particles, adverbs and directionals, as well as different types of stems, such as bipartite stems. We then change focus to areas outside of the verb where location can be marked, in particular by means of phrases headed by adpositions, spatial relational nouns, and locative case markers.
