Explaining the diversity of antipassives: Formal grammar vs. (diachronic) typology

Abstract

Abstract Antipassives have different structural and semantic properties and are used under different conditions across languages. They also show a few universal tendencies: For instance, they generally correlate with imperfectivity. Both the diversity and the universal tendencies of antipassives have fostered a variety of analyses of this construction type in the formalist and the functional typological frameworks. In this article, these analyses will be surveyed with a view to establishing their explanatory potential and will be compared with a diachronic typological account of how antipassives diverge and what they have in common. It will be shown that at least part of this diversity finds a straightforward explanation once the sources of the antipassive are taken into account and that most of the semantic and distributional universals of antipassives are persistent features of their sources.

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