The findings on the patterns of polysemy sharing reinforce the notion of a clear typological split between Tibeto-Burman languages on the one hand, and Sinitic, Kra–Dai, Hmong–Mien, and Austroasiatic on the other. Crucially, the intervening stage of an existential construction provides the necessary bridging context for possessive reanalysis in this first pathway, while possessive verbs are formally distinct from locatives in the second, bearing no diachronic relationship to them. On this basis, an implicational universal is adduced to the effect that no diachronic adjacency exists between locative and possessive constructions. Type I and Type II languages additionally reveal a recurrent polysemy between Locative and Copular verbs. We argue that there are three grammaticalization pathways which motivate the four synchronic patterns: Type III languages are distinguished by the grammaticalization chain: (P ostural verb) > (Dwell) > Locative > Existential > Possessive, while the other two types, Type II and Type IV, show an opposing pathway: ( Grasp) > Possessive > Existential. As a consequence, its second objective is to model the diachronic change underlying four language types identified on this basis from the data. Its first objective is to examine four distinct synchronic patterns of areal polysemy, created by the semantic domains of copular, locative, existential and possessive verbs and the constructions they form. This study is based on a sample of 116 languages from the Mainland East and Southeast Asian linguistic area.
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