The antipassive as a Romance phenomenon: A case study of Italian

Abstract

This study focuses on the Italian pronominal verbs lamentarsi 'lament/complain', ricordarsi 'remember/remind', vantarsi 'praise/boast' and their transitive counterparts and analyzes their distribution from the 13 th to the 21 st century across different syntactic environments, with particular attention to logical object expressions. It explores the possibility of an antipassive (AP) analysis, thereby adding a Romance perspective to the growing research of the historical development of the AP. The pronominal constructions of the sample that select an oblique complement display structural characteristics typical of the AP. Namely, they contain a demoted logical object, are structurally intransitive and semantically transitive, mark the oblique using the preposition di, display a detransitivizing "AP morpheme" si, and have a transitive counterpart. For all three verb pairs, there is initially a high frequency of AP constructions (13 th -15 th centuries), followed by a decrease in favor of transitive constructions with a direct object complement.