Where do antipassive constructions come from? A study in diachronic typology (original) (raw)

The sources of antipassive constructions: a cross-linguistic survey

In M. Cennamo & C. Fabrizio (eds.), Historical Linguistics 2015, Selected papers from the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples, 27-31 July 2015. Amsterdam: John Benjamins., 2019

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.

Antipassive constructions: Correlations of form and function across languages

Linguistic Typology

This paper presents a cross-linguistic investigation of the antipassive within the framework of Radical Construction Grammar. Based on function, this study identifies constructions in 70 languages from 25 language families and four geographical macro areas. Iconically motivated correlations were found between functions and the morphosyntactic strategies they employ. The results of this study suggest that constructions indicating the lower individuation of patients and constructions indicating the lower affectedness of patients, previously grouped together as ‘antipassive’, should be considered two separate construction types. This is based on their separate functions, the distinct morphosyntactic strategies used to encode them across languages, and differences in productivity with regard to semantic classes of verbs.

Explaining the diversity of antipassives: formal grammar vs. (diachronic) typology

LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS COMPASS (2018), vol. 12, issue 6

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.

The antipassive derivation and the lexical meaning of the verb

Say, Sergey. The antipassive derivation and the lexical meaning of the verb. In: Janic, Katarzyna and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (eds.). Antipassive: Typology, diachrony, and related constructions [Typological Studies in Language 130]. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins., 2021

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.