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

Abstract

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 imperfectivity. 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.

Routes Towards The Irrealis

“…Diachronic typology rests on the assumption that diachrony may provide explanations of synchronic typological tendencies and distributions, and that these explanations are more powerful and far‐reaching than those based on (synchronic) functional factors such as economy, iconicity, harmony or ease of processing (Givón 1984; 1991; Gildea 1998; Cristofaro 2017; 2019; Sansò 2017; 2018; Collins 2019; among many others). Diachronic (or, better, source‐oriented) explanations have been provided within this approach for:…”

The rise of middle voice systems

“…[30] Guglielmo Inglese Over the past decades, typologists have repeatedly advocated a diachronic approach to cross-linguistic regularities, claiming that these may in part be explained by "mutational constraints", that is, "constraints on possible diachronic transitions or possible diachronic sources, which can have an effect on synchronic distribution. " (Haspelmath 2019: 8; see also Sansò 2018;Cristofaro 2019). Once properly taken into consideration, the historical evidence presented in §4 also offers an explanation for several tendencies in the synchronic variation of MVSs.…”

Typology of coding patterns and frequency effects of antipassives

“…Antipassive-verb markers are typically polyfunctional and may also express some other diathetic function (Polinsky 2017: 314;Say 2021). Different patterns of polyfunctionality (or syncretism) have been described in the literature (see, inter alia, Shibatani 2006: 239;Janic 2016aJanic , 2016bSansò 2017Sansò , 2018Jacques 2021), and so we only mention the most frequent ones here: incorporated reciprocal pronouns, indefinite pronouns and markers of middle voice (and thus often former reflexives). For example, the monovalent antipassive (marked by the circumfix k(a)-…-ti) in Cavineña (Pano-Tucanoan) is primarily used as the middle voice including reflexive and reciprocal functions (Guillaume 2008: 274ff ).…”