Typological Hierarchies in Synchrony and Diachrony

This paper discusses the history of generic person marking systems in several Gyalrong languages. While closely related, Japhug and Tshobdun differ considerably: the inverse prefix marks generic A in Japhug, while it appears in the generic P form in Tshobdun. We propose a historical scenario to explain how such radically different systems came into being, proposing in particular that one of the generic human markers was grammaticalized from a nominalizer, and show that our reconstruction can als