The Slavonic Languages and the Development of the Antipassive Marker

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

“…Creissels (2012) reconstructed the Proto-West-Mande suffix *-i as the source of a detransitivizing suffix that grammaticalized into the reflexive pronoun í for Mandinka, among other Mande languages, and functions as an AP marker for some verbs (2012: 15). This is also observed and studied by Janic (2013) for Slavonic (specifically, Polish and Russian). An earlier paper by Terrill (1997), focusing on the development of AP in Australian languages, examined the diachronic processes by which the verbal morphology of reflexive constructions is reanalyzed and extended to AP constructions, first to a pragmatic AP and then to a structural AP.…”

“…Typological studies of the AP, such as Polinsky (2017), present and discuss various manifestations of this construction and weave together characteristics shared across ergative and accusative languages, which can serve as a set of diagnostics to identify the AP. To date, the historical work on the AP has been limited to non-Romance languages; for instance, Terrill (1997), Creissels (2012), Janic (2013), and Sansò (2017, 2019 identified the reflexive construction as one of several sources of the AP marker. These studies, however, do not look for supporting evidence from Romance; moreover, the current research on the Romance AP does not adopt a diachronic perspective.…”