Elative marker in the constructions with physical contact verbs: evidence from Hill Mari

We are going to look at the Hill Mari (<Finno-Ugric) constructions with an elative postposition 'gə̈c'. In addition to standard elative contexts, gə̈c has some typologically predictable uses such as Information source, Set from which something is selected, Material, Standard of comparison etc. At the same time, the postposition gə̈c has a completely unexpected meaning which is just opposite of its elative-based uses – it is Contact point. We argue that the meaning of Contact point arises from the encoding of Selection from the set. Our assumption is supported by the syntactic and semantic restrictions related to this construction.