Typology of coding patterns and frequency effects of antipassives

Abstract

Frequency asymmetries within a minimal grammatical domain create offline associations that languages tend to exploit for a more efficient encoding. We explore cross-linguistic coding patterns of antipassives. We first argue that antipassive markers tend to have properties of derivational markers. Secondly, we show that antipassives are considerably rarer than the basic transitive constructions. The lower frequency correlates with the length of coding: antipassives tend to be coded with longer forms than basic transitive verbs. Thirdly, we explore frequency associations of different lexical input types and find that it is the rare input types that tend to select the antipassive, if the marking is differential, while the frequent ones correlate with the unmarked verb (A-lability). We, furthermore, show that the rarer argument types and argument scenarios correlate stronger with antipassives than the more frequent argument types and scenarios.

Between Symmetrical Voice and Ergativity: Inverse and Antipassive in Movima

“…In recent years, many detailed studies have been published on the forms and functions of antipassive constructions, both in individual languages and from a typological perspective (see especially Heaton 2017; Janic 2016; Janic & Witzlack-Makarevich 2021a; Seržant et al 2021). It may seem that by now, all the aspects of antipassive and related constructions have been discovered and sufficiently discussed.…”

“…This accounts for the seemingly surprising fact that in Movima, the antipassive is more frequent than the functionally equivalent transitive construction, the inverse (cf Seržant et al 2021…”