Alternation ‘applicative’ (Coded)

Crosslinguistically, applicatives are overt verbal morphemes that “allow the coding of a thematically peripheral argument or adjunct as a core-object argument” (Peterson 2007: 1). One of the Gothic verbs of our sample features the so-called be-alternation, known for Germanic languages and described by Haspelmath and Baumann (2013) for the ValPaL core meanings: the activity simplex verb laugh hlahjan, with the addition of the preverb bi- (literally) ‘around’, results in the transitive compound bi-hlahjan, which takes accusative stimuli.