Antipassive

The Proceedings of the 39th Siouan and Caddoan Conference follows the meeting of the 39th Siouan and Caddoan Language Conference from May 30-31, 2019 at Northeastern State University in Broken Arrow, OK.  This volume was published on July 31, 2020 in through the Northeastern State University Department of Languages and Literature and edited by Ryan M. Kasak, Samiron Dutta, and Justin T. McBride.

The papers are copyright of their original authors and are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0).

This dissertation presents the results of a typological study that investigated the global
distribution of antipassive constructions, as well as the distribution of the relevant antipassive-related
features. The sample includes data from 445 languages, which represent 144 language
families and isolates. This larger study is informed by an in-depth analysis of Kaqchikel
antipassives, and how this influences our understanding of antipassives of Mayan languages.
The goals of this study are (1) to provide a more comprehensive look at antipassives and
antipassive-type structures than had previously been attempted; (2) to provide an updated
account of antipassives in Mayan languages, based on primary data; (3) to discover which other
typological factors relate to the existence of antipassives in a particular language (4) to discover
the types and distribution of features in antipassive-type constructions cross-linguistically, and
(5) to establish guidelines for the identification and description of antipassive-type constructions
in a wide variety of languages.
Among other discoveries, findings show that about 25% of the world’s language have
antipassive constructions. Antipassives tend to exist in languages with ergative-absolutive verb
alignment, although there are also non-ergative languages which have antipassives. Additionally,
while there is on some level a division between antipassives which serve primarily syntactic
functions and those which serve primarily pragmatic functions, the more consistent distinction is
between antipassives with allow the patient to be expressed in an oblique phrase and those which
do not. There are also a small number of languages which can be said to have more than one
antipassive.
Mayan languages are known for having a rather large number of voice distinctions,
including passives and antipassives. I identify five morphosyntactically distinct agent-preserving
vii
detransitivizing constructions in Kaqchikel, two of which I considered to be antipassives. I also
look at several issues involving the markers for these constructions, the syntactic contexts in
which they appear, and how they differ in terms of their function. The facts for Kaqchikel are
also compared with what is known about other K’ichean and non-K’ichean languages.

Questo secondo volume della collana CLUB Working Papers in Linguistics raccoglie alcuni dei contributi presentati durante il secondo anno di attività del CLUB – Circolo Linguistico dell’Università di Bologna (a.a. 2016/2017). Il volume contiene dieci saggi a firma di Fabio Ardolino (vincitore del premio CLUB ‘Una tesi in linguistica’ per l’anno 2017), Ilaria Fiorentini, Giuliana Fiorentino, Chiara Gianollo, Eugenio Goria, Elisabetta Jezek, Alberto Manco, Caterina Mauri, Francesco Olivucci, Andrea Sansò.

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the main sources of antipassives based on a 120-language sample. The sample includes the 48 languages with an antipassive in the WALS (Polinsky 2013) + 72 further languages in which an antipassive or a functionally equivalent construction is attested (e.g. deobjective constructions, unspecified object constructions, etc.). The diachronic sources of antipassives are identified drawing on two kinds of evidence: (i) etymological reconstructions based on the comparative method; (ii) synchronic resemblance between (some features of) the source construction and (some features of) the target construction. Four main diachronic sources are recurrent in the sample: (i) agent nominalizations; (ii) generic/indefinite items filling the object position (e.g. person for animate objects, (some)thing for inanimate objects); (iii) action nominalizations, sometimes accompanied by a light verb like ‘do’; (iv) morphemes encoding reflexive/reciprocal actions. For each of these sources, a diachronic scenario is proposed through which the antipassive construction might have come into existence. The article also explores the hypothesis that at least some of the functional and structural differences among antipassive constructions across languages may be explained by taking into account the diachronic sources of these constructions.

This paper shows that there are two synchronically distinct i- markers in Ainu,
viz. the derivational antipassive i- and inflectional ‘fourth’ person object i- with
the functions of first person plural inclusive, second person honorific, and logophoric.
The derivational antipassive marker i- ‘person/thing’ can be regarded as
an antipassive marker per se based on its syntactic (eliminating a patient/theme/
recipient argument), semantic (denoting an unspecified generic participant or
lexicalizing it to a single or subset of objects) and discourse (patient-defocusing)
properties. Contrary to the accepted view, I adduce the ‘antipassive to 1PL.INCL.O’’
scenario based on extensive cross-linguistic and Ainu-internal evidence. The antipassive i-, in its turn, originated in the incorporation of a generic noun *i ‘thing/
place/time’, which is not unusual in languages without overt expression of the
demoted O participant in the antipassive. The extended use of the antipassive i- is
attested on obligatorily possessed nouns to enable their use without possessive affixes. Finally, my corpus-based study of semantic classes of verbs with a predilection for antipassive derivation revealed that the antipassive in Ainu is most likely to apply to a ‘middle section’ of the semantic transitivity hierarchy since it belongs to the lower individuation of patients (LIP) type, which is assumed to be more
typical of antipassives in non-ergative languages.

Descriptions of antipassive constructions in individual languages show that these constructions are often compatible with only a subset of transitive verbs. There are significant typological similarities between the sets of verbs that allow antipassivization. The following properties are typical of these verbs: i) agentive A, ii) specification of the manner component in the verb meaning, iii) lack of inherent telicity (the transitive use can be compositionally transitive, but this is cancelled under antipassivization), iv) narrow class of potential Ps, and v) affectedness of A. Verbs with all of the properties in i)-v), such as 'eat', constitute the core of " natural antipassives " , whereas verbs with only some of these properties are at the periphery of this class. Apart from being especially prone to enter antipassive constructions, the fuzzy class of natural antipassives is relevant for a number of phenomena. i) Polyfunctional valency-related markers or constructions tend to yield antipassive reading when applied to natural antipassives. ii) Natural antipassives tend to choose the less marked construction in languages with two antipassive constructions. iii) Lexicalization of antipassives is more likely for verbs that lack natural antipassive properties, and a typical scenario of lexicalization involves coercion of some of these properties. Ultimately, I conjecture that it is the relevance of the P-argument for the meaning of the verb which accounts for the rarity of fully productive and semantically uniform antipassive constructions in the world's languages.

Antipassive constructions may be polysemous, with aspectual and modal functions other than patient demotion, and may differ with respect to the way agents and patients are coded. This paper explores the hypothesis that at least some of these differences can be explained by taking into account the diachronic sources of these constructions, which hold the key to some regularities. The sample includes the 48 languages with an antipassive in the WALS (Polinsky 2013) + 50 languages in which an antipassive or a functionally equivalent construction is attested. These functionally equivalent constructions are generally not labelled as antipassives in grammatical descriptions, and alternative labels such as depatientive, deobjective, unspecified object construction, etc. are used. The diachronic sources of all these constructions are identified drawing on two kinds of evidence: (i) etymological reconstructions based on the comparative method; (ii) synchronic resemblance between (some features of) the source construction and (some features of) the target construction. Four main sources are found to be recurrent in the sample: (i) agent nominalizations; (ii) generic/indefinite elements filling the object position (e.g. person for animate objects, (some)thing for inanimate objects); (iii) action nominalizations, either alone or accompanied by a light verb like ‘do’ ( do the washing); (iv) morphemes encoding reflexive and/or reciprocal actions. For each of these sources, a diachronic scenario is sketched through which the antipassive construction might have developed out of the source.

This paper examines a series of voice alternations in Kelabit, a Western Austronesian language of Northern Sarawak. Traditionally, Western Austronesian languages are subcategorised into ‘Philippine-type’ and ‘Indonesian-type’ on the basis of shared structural properties. This paper raises the question, however, of whether a two-way typology is sufficient to represent the variation within Austronesian voice systems. This comes in light of Aldridge’s (2011) claim that Western Austronesian languages have undergone a change from ergative to accusative alignment. If this is the case, we would expect to find evidence of intermediate stages in the transition. Consequently, an independent methodology for studying voice and alignment is proposed and applied to the Kelabit voice system. Comparing voices on morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels yields some interesting findings. Firstly, it suggests that the Kelabit voice-system could represent a transition from ergative to accusative via the reanalysis of an antipassive construction as active voice. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it suggests the two-way typology is too narrow to capture all of the distinctions in Austronesian voice systems. Thus extending such an approach to the study of Austronesian voice more generally could prove significant when addressing wider questions, such as the theory of alignment shift.

Please note: there is a typo in Table 10 on page 21. The figure for Actor TP in UV should be 3.12 rather than 3.82. All other figures are correct.

The current approaches to the Tagalog focus system attach too much importance to syntactic transitivity, and leave unanswered the question of how the focus system correlates with voice phenomena, thereby failing to elucidate its functional aspects. In this paper, we address this question by examining the middle voice and related voice phenomena in this language. Adopting the conceptual framework for voice phenomena (Shibatani 2006), we claim that Goal Focus (GF) verb forms express active situations, whereas Actor Focus (AF) verb forms represent two different non-active situations, namely, middle situations with introverted verbs and antipassive situations with extroverted verbs. AF verb forms also work for actor nominalization. We argue that these two functions of AF verb forms, non-active voice categories and actor nominalization, stem from their primary function, namely, actor-focusing.

Ergative case, the special case of transitive subjects, raises questions not only for the theory of case but also for theories of subjecthood and transitivity. This paper analyzes the case system of Nez Perce, a “three-way ergative” language, with an eye towards a formalization of the category of transitive subject. I show that it is object agreement that is determinative of transitivity, and hence of ergative case, in Nez Perce. I further show that the transitivity condition on ergative case must be cou- pled with a criterion of subjecthood that makes reference to participation in subject agreement, not just to origin in a high argument-structural position. These two results suggest a formalization of the transitive subject as that argument uniquely accessing both high and low agreement information, the former through its (agreement-derived) connection with T and the latter through its origin in the specifier of a head associ- ated with object agreement (v). In view of these findings, I argue that ergative case morphology should be analyzed not as the expression of a syntactic primitive but as the morphological spell-out of subject agreement and object agreement on a nominal.

Antipassives have different structural and semantic properties and are used under different conditions across languages. They also show a few universal tendencies: for instance, they generally correlate with imperfec-tivity. Both the diversity and the universal tendencies of antipassives have fostered a variety of analyses of this construction type in the formalist and the functional-typological frameworks. In this article, these analyses will be surveyed with a view to establishing their explanatory potential and will be compared with a diachronic-typological account of how antipassives diverge and what they have in common. It will be shown that at least part of this diversity finds a straightforward explanation once the sources of the antipassive are taken into account, and that most of the semantic and distributional universals of antipassives are persistent features of their sources.

Antipassive constructions are derived intransitive constructions based on transitive verbs in which the patientive argument is demoted to an oblique position or left unexpressed. There are no dedicated antipassive markers in Slavic, but several subtypes of reflexive verbs meet the definition of antipassive. In particular, all Slavic languages have reflexive constructions in which the patientive participant remains unexpressed. The unexpressed participant is interpreted as unspecified in some reflexive constructions and as semantically incorporated in other constructions. Both subtypes of constructions are lexically restricted.

This paper discusses the reduplication processes that are at work in Cavineña, a Tacanan language from Amazonian Bolivia. This language presents a wide range of different reduplication processes which have the following main characteristics: they can be simple or automatic, full or partial; they apply mostly to verbs, nouns and adjectives; they have different degrees of productivity; they are phonologically rather easy to describe. In addition to being pervasive, the morphological processes of reduplication in Cavineña are noteworthy for having several syntactic effects, an aspect of reduplication rarely discussed in general typological works on reduplication; these tend to focus on phonological and semantic characteristics. A particularly interesting syntactic function of reduplication in Cavineña is valence reduction with antipassive effect, which occurs when reduplication applies to transitive verbal roots.

Traditionally, antipassive constructions have been associated with ergative-absolutive languages and few authors have noted their presence in nominative-accusative languages.
This construction is used primarily to promote the agent and diminish the valency of the verb. The consequence is the relegation (demotion as an adjunct or deletion, that is, an absolutive construction) of the patient of the transitive verb. In ergative languages, this modification leads to a change of case for the agent: it is marked by the ergative case in the transitive
construction and by the absolutive case in the intransitive antipassive construction. This modification does not occur in nominative-accusative languages because the agent of the
transitive construction preserves its function of subject in the intransitive antipassive construction and retains the same morphological marking (the nominative case, for example).
In this paper, I show the existence of antipassive constructions in diverse nominative accusative varieties of Mesoamerican languages. I describe this construction with transitive
verbs, showing that constructions can be found in which the patient is deleted or demoted. I then examine this construction with ditransitive verbs, showing that depending on the
language in question, either the patient or the receptor is relegated. Finally, I show that the degree of humanity of the referent of the relegated element may be a prominent factor in the restriction of the use of this construction.

Previous theoretical discussion about inverse systems has largely revolved around the synchronic and diachronic relationship between the inverse and the passive. In contrast, this study argues for the antipassive origins of two inverse constructions in Monsang (Trans-Himalayan), which are used for 3→SAP and 2→1 scenarios. This questions central assumptions from previous accounts about the functional motivation underlying inverse systems, and suggests that strategies of avoiding overt reference may be at play. The diachronic pathway proposed here connects the traditional inverse with other special marking patterns that involve speech act participant objects, in particular the 'pseudo-inverse' construction of innovative first person object indexation.

This paper implores the question of ergativity of Kapampangan through the presence of antipassive constructions in the language. Philippine languages had been claimed to be best described as an accusative language, or not at all. Only a few claimed that Philippine languages, including Kapampangan, as ergative language. Kapampangan contains a stable pronominal clitics that provide information for the core arguments of the clause and follow an ergative system. Also, it proves the presence of antipassives, an intransitive-like construction that contains two or more arguments but only has one core argument. Ergative analysis is utilized to examine these constructions. This analysis is limited to simple transitive, intransitive and antipassive constructions in Kapampangan.

The middle-marking suffix demonstrates the unusual characteristic of functioning as a comitative applicative with a small set of verbs in Southeastern Kuki-Chin (recent South Central Tibeto-Burman) languages, Hyow, Laitu, Loktu and Asho. The corresponding forms in Southwestern Kuki-Chin languages, Khumi, Rengmitca and Lemi, show that a related element is consistently used as causative and applicative (comitative, instrumental and goal) marker, but not as a middle marker. The cross-linguistic evidence pertaining to applicative-antipassive/deobjectivization polysemy and the absence of a prefixal detransitivizing strategy in Southeastern Kuki-Chin languages (except in Daai, which has a prefixal detransitivizing element and shows rather less-developed middle functions), indicate that once used as a comitative applicative, the suffix in question has developed into a detransitivizing element (or middle) in these languages.

В современном русском языке активизировалась возвратная конструкция, при образовании которой «за кадром» оказывается нерелевантный участник, который мог бы занять позицию прямого дополнения в конструкции с соотносительным (исходным) невозвратным переходным глаголом. Рассматриваемая возвратная конструкция оказывается своего рода компромиссом в ситуации, когда и эксплицитная переходная конструкция, и конструкция с простым опущением прямого дополнения при переходном глаголе являются прагматически нежелательными для говорящего. Опущение участника происходит с опорой на активацию определенного фрейма, в рамках которого этот участник оказывается предсказуемым. Использование рассматриваемой конструкции отражает распределение прагматического веса между компонентами выражаемого смысла. То, что условия использования конструкции лежат в дискурсивно-прагматической плоскости, а не в области синтаксиса или каких-либо жестких семантических параметров, свидетельствует о грамматикализационной молодости явления.

This chapter presents typical properties of the antipassive, addresses its cross-linguistic distribution, and discusses main existing analyses. ''Antipassives" are constructions in which the logical object of a transitive (two-place) predicate is not realized as a direct object, but instead appears as a non-core argument or left unexpressed (but presupposed). The morphological realization of the antipassive is more varied than is usually assumed; in particular, pseudo noun incorporation, true noun incorporation, and bi-absolutive constructions can instantiate the antipassive. The antipassive and the passive are not mutually exclusive; a number of examples in this chapter provide empirical evidence in support of antipassive/passive compatibility. The antipassive is not limited to ergative languages, although it may be more noticeable under ergative configuration. Lexicalist approaches contend that antipassive predicates are specified independently of transitive predicates and enter syntax with case-licensing properties. Existing syntactic analyses of the antipassive converge on the notion that the object is licensed differently in the antipassive than it is in transitive clauses, but diverge with respect to the details of the licensing. Under one family of analyses, the internal argument of a two-place verb is saturated by a nominal element, preventing the verb from assigning structural case to its logical object. Under a second family of analyses, the logical object in the antipassive is licensed inside the verb phrase, and the object of regular transitive verbs is licensed in a higher position in the structure. Recurrent properties of the antipassive include the imperfective interpretation and the backgrounding of the logical object. However common, these properties are not universally associated with the antipassive and cannot be used to define it. for helpful comments; I am solely responsible for any errors in it. Unless stated otherwise, examples come from my own fieldnotes. Many thanks to Raxmet Yesheva (Adyghe), Peter Inenlikey and Vladimir Raxtilin (Chukchi), Winifred Bauer (Māori), Pedro Mateo Pedro (Q'anjob'al), Sisilia Lutui (Tongan), and Roksolana Mykhaylyk (Ukrainian) for linguistic examples.