In:Antipassive: Typology, diachrony, and related constructions
Edited by Katarzyna Janic and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich
[Typological Studies in Language 130] 2021
► pp. 65–96
Chapter 3Antipassive in the Cariban family
Published online: 23 March 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.130.03sap
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.130.03sap
Abstract
To date, no published reference grammar of a
Cariban language has described an antipassive construction. However,
all languages of the family have a cognate verbal morpheme, termed
detransitivizer, which prefixes to a transitive verb to
derive an intransitive verb. While monovalent, the detransitivized
verb bears inflectional person morphology that is distinct from that
of non-derived intransitive verbs. We collected all available text
examples of detransitivized verbs from five Cariban languages
(Akawaio, Hixkaryana, Kari’nja, Tiriyó, and Ye’kwana) and
categorized them into formal and functional subtypes. Alongside the
well-described functions of reflexive/reciprocal/middle,
anticausative, and passive, we encountered a substantial number of
examples that can only be characterized as antipassive: the S of the
detransitivized verb corresponds to the A of the transitive verb
from which it is derived and the P of the transitive verb is either
absent or expressed in an oblique (locative) PP.
This paper has four goals: first, we present the
detransitivized construction and explain the methodology by which we
identify tokens of the construction functioning as an antipassive.
Second, we present the results of our text counts – a significant
number of the categorizable detransitivized tokens have the
antipassive function – and we discuss why this phenomenon has been
overlooked until now. Third, given that the detransitivized
construction is semantically polysemous, we explore the conditions
under which it has an antipassive reading, identifying one pragmatic
and two semantic subtypes: Nontopical P, Semantically Absent P, and
Locative P. Finally, we discuss the implications of these patterns
for a diachronic typology of antipassive.
Keywords: Cariban family, antipassive, detransitivizer, valence
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The Cariban detransitivized construction
- 2.1Categorizing detransitivized verbs
- 2.2Methodological questions
- 3.Attested types of antipassive with the detransitivizer
- 3.1Antipassives with a nontopical P
- 3.2A radical type of antipassive: The apatientive
- 3.3The “locative” P
- 3.4Idiosyncratic antipassives
- 4.Conclusion: Is this an ‘antipassive’ and how could it become (a better) one?
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2021. The multifaceted nature of the antipassive construction. In Antipassive [Typological Studies in Language, 130], ► pp. 1 ff.
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