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The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the main sources of antipassive constructions 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”; and (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.

Ad hoc categorization is the bottom-up abstraction of a category starting from concrete exemplars of the category itself. When we observe linguistic data, we find various phenomena that provide evidence for the ubiquity of such an on-line, goal-driven and context-dependent categorization in everyday communication. Beyond offering concept labels in the form of words, language indeed provides speakers with a great number of strategies to convey reference to a class by naming representative individuals. After providing a semantic and pragmatic account of ad hoc categorization in terms of indexicality, we will survey ad hoc categorization strategies in discourse and across languages: they can be syntactic (lists, general extenders, exemplifying constructions), morphological (heterogeneous plurals, collectives, aggregates, compounds), or in-between (reduplication). We will argue that all these strategies show a similar abstract structure consisting in a categorization trigger, that is, some prosodic, morphological or syntactic element triggering the abstractive inferential process towards the category identification, plus a linguistic expression referring to some overt category member, which is processed as the starting point for abstraction. The diachronic connections between these strategies and the pathways leading to their emergence and conventionalization also speak in favor of their unified treatment.

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The question addressed in this paper is whether (and to what extent) a semantic map aimed at representing the multifunctionality of a given construction (or set of constructions) in discourse can be thought of as endowed with conceptual reality. To be considered as a mental representation that is essentially similar in all human brains, such a map should meet two requirements: (i) its nodes should be bundles of semantic and pragmatic properties that form conceptual archetypes, that is, ways of conceptualizing and categorizing dynamic or static configurations that are fundamental to human experience; (ii) there should be a high degree of regularity in the data material, i.e. each construction should be associated with a node or a contiguous set of nodes in a regular way. However, observing the use of grammatical constructions in discourse provides us with compelling evidence that discourse contexts are complex entities involving many different variables, and that "a perfect fit is not the usual state of affairs for models of complex human behavior (including language)" (Croft and Poole 2008:6). Based on a previous analysis of various passive and impersonal constructions in a parallel corpus of five European languages, I will argue that a first-generation semantic map representing the distribution of these constructions in discourse and comprising a few conceptual archetypes may be only an idealized abstraction over the conflicting evidence of the association between discourse contexts and construction types. As an idealization, such a map is not particularly informative as to language-specific tendencies and idiosyncrasies and does not allow us to analyze all the datasets that we might be interested in analyzing. On the other hand, a second-generation semantic map proves to be a more reliable tool for representing variation in discourse and does not force the analyst to posit (and multiply) conceptual structures where there may be none.

This chapter deals with the morphosyntactic and distributional properties of subjunctive and irrealis, with a special focus on their mutual relation and on their relation with indicative and realis in terms of markedness. More complex systems in which there are other moods besides the realis/irrealis (or indicative/subjunctive) dichotomy (e.g. potential, conditional, etc.) are also discussed. The topic is addressed from a terminological, typological, and diachronic perspective, illustrating the most influential approaches to these two linguistic notions. In discussing their phenomenology, it is shown that the distributional differences may in some cases be explained by considering the diachronic development of subjunctives and irrealis forms (both in terms of the identification of their diachronic sources and in terms of how these markers spread throughout different subparts of the functional domain of modality).

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