Antipassive voice

The antipassive voice is a verb voice found mostly in ergative languages. Like the passive voice, the antipassive decreases the verb's valency by one.

The antipassive works on transitive verbs by deleting the object (marked with the absolutive case) and changing the agent from ergative to absolutive.

:"Mary-ERG eats pie-ABS." → "Mary-ABS eats.":"He-ERG is telling the truth-ABS." → "He-ABS is talking."

As with passive voice, the deleted argument can be re-introduced as an optional complement or oblique argument.

:"Mary-ERG eats pie-ABS." → "Mary-ABS eats "from the pie"."

Antipassives frequently convey aspectual or modal information, and may cast the clause as imperfective, inceptive, or potential.

The purpose of antipassive construction is often to make certain arguments available as pivots for relativization, coordination of sentences or similar constructions. For example in Dyirbal the omitted argument in conjoined sentences must be in absolutive case. Thus, the following sentence is ungrammatical:

:"*bayi yaɽa bani-nʲu balan dʲugumbil buɽa-n":M-ABS man-ABS come-NFUT F-ABS woman-ABS see-NFUT:'The man came and saw the woman'

In the conjoined sentence the omitted argument (the man) would have to be in ergative case, being the agent of a transitive verb (to see). This is not allowed in Dyirbal. In order to make this sentence grammatical, the antipassive, which promotes the original ergative to absolutive - and puts the former absolutive (the woman) into dative case -, has to be used:

:"bayi yaɽa bani-nʲu bagun dʲugumbil-gu buɽal-ŋa-nʲu":M-ABS man-ABS come-NFUT F-DAT woman-DAT see-APASS-NFUT:'The man came and saw the woman'

Examples from Basque

Basque has an antipassive voice, which puts the agent into the absolutive case, but does not delete the absolutive object. This leads to the agent and object being in the same case.

:"Gauza miragarriak ikusi ditut (nik)":thing wonderful-PL-ABS see-PERF have-PRES-PL-I (I-ERG):I have seen wonderful things.

when transformed using the antipassive voice, becomes:

:"Gauza miragarriak ikusirik nago / ikusia naiz":thing wonderful-PL-ABS see-PERF-STAT am / see-PERF-ACT am:*I am seen wonderful things

External links

* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAntipassiveVoice.htm What is Antipassive Voice?] at SIL
* [http://www.ethnologue.com/LL_docs/index/Antipassivevoice(Linguistics).asp Antipassive voice bibliography] at Ethnologue
* [http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/8/lfg03beach.doc "Asymmetries between Passivization and Antipassivization in the Tarramiutut Subdialect of Inuktitut"] by Matthew Beach (MS-Word file)