Locative and Existential Constructions in Ulwa

This article lays out the morphosyntactic and semantic facts of existential and locative constructions in Ulwa (Misumalpan; Nicaragua). Locative constructions come in two types—those that take one of a small set of posture predicates, and those that are completely bare, having only a figure and locative (postpositional phrase) nonverbal predicate. The posture predicates constitute a distinct syntactic category. Among the posture predicates, ‘sit’ is special in being polysemous, having both a locative and more semantically bleached existential meaning. Bare locative constructions do not have the existential meaning of the bleached ‘sit’ construction; rather, they have a pure locative meaning.