Edited by Katarzyna Janic and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich
This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the morpho-syntactic and semantic aspects of the antipassive construction from synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives. The nineteen contributions assembled in this volume address a wide range of aspects pertinent to the antipassive… read more
The coding of antipassive constructions displays crosslinguistically irregular though noteworthy patterns. It commonly involves a phonologically overt form, labeled here antipassivizer. However, this segmental coding is not the only way to signal an antipassive meaning. In some languages,… read more
The present chapter opens the volume by proving an overview of the antipassive construction from the typological perspective. After setting the scene by introducing the major theoretical concepts used in this volume, we consider various aspects of the formal and functional variation of the… read more
In this paper, we propose treating alignment shift as a process of functional markedness reversal in the domain of semantically transitive constructions. We illustrate how this approach allows us to capture similarities between the alignment shifts in Eskimo-Aleut and Western Austronesian… read more
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. read more
This article deals with the development of dedicated antipassive markers in a crosslinguistic perspective, with a special attention given to Slavonic languages. Initially, this marker was associated exclusively with ergative languages in which it was treated as a valence reducing operator. Attached… read more
