Benefactives in Laz

The paper deals with the expression of benefactives in Laz, an endangered South Caucasian language spoken in North-East Turkey. Laz has two ways of encoding benefactives: an applicative derivation and a postposition (šeni). In the preliminary sections, I present the system of cross-referencing affix es, the major alignment types and the system of valency operators. Then I describe the morphosyntax and semantics of the applicative derivation and the postposition used to encode beneficiaries, before some tentative remarks about the factors that may condition the choice between the applicative and the postposition. Both the applicative and the postposition have a range of other functions: the applicative may express the recipient, the locative and the possessor; the postposition may express the cause, the purpose and also has the meaning ‘about, concerning’.