abbreviated
An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...
or ) is a type of
grammatical voice
In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the goal of which is to form ...
that either does not include the
object
Object may refer to:
General meanings
* Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept
** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place
** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter
* Goal, an ...
or includes the object in an
oblique case
In grammar, an oblique (abbreviated ; from la, casus obliquus) or objective case ( abbr. ) is a nominal case other than the nominative case, and sometimes, the vocative.
A noun or pronoun in the oblique case can generally appear in any role ex ...
. This construction is similar to the
passive voice
A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the ''theme'' or ''patient'' of the main verb – that is, the person or thing t ...
, in that it decreases the verb's valency by one – the passive by deleting the agent and "promoting" the object to become the subject of the passive construction, the antipassive by deleting the object and "promoting" the agent to become the subject of the antipassive construction.
Occurrence
The antipassive voice is found in
Basque
Basque may refer to:
* Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France
* Basque language, their language
Places
* Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France
* Basque Country (autonomous co ...
, in
Mayan
Mayan most commonly refers to:
* Maya peoples, various indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and northern Central America
* Maya civilization, pre-Columbian culture of Mesoamerica and northern Central America
* Mayan languages, language family spoken ...
,
Salishan
The Salishan (also Salish) languages are a family of languages of the Pacific Northwest in North America (the Canadian province of British Columbia and the American states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana). They are characterised by ...
,
Northeast Caucasian
The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestani or ''Vainakh-Daghestani'', is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as ...
Australian
Australian(s) may refer to:
Australia
* Australia, a country
* Australians, citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia
** European Australians
** Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians descended principally from British colonists
** Aboriginal A ...
languages, and also in some Amazonian languages (e.g. Cavineña, Kanamarí).Dixon, R.M.W. & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds) (1990). ''The Amazonian Languages''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Antipassive voice predominantly occurs in ergative languages where the deletion of an object "promotes" the subject from ergative case to absolutive case. In certain accusative languages that have verbal agreement with both subject and object, the antipassive is usually formed by deletion of the object affix. Examples of accusative languages with this type of antipassive are
Maasai Maasai may refer to:
* Maasai people
*Maasai language
* Maasai mythology
* MAASAI (band)
See also
* Masai (disambiguation)
* Massai
Massai (also known as: Masai, Massey, Massi, Mah–sii, Massa, Wasse, Wassil or by the nickname "Big Foot" Mas ...
Cahuilla
The Cahuilla , also known as ʔívil̃uqaletem or Ivilyuqaletem, are a Native American people of the various tribes of the Cahuilla Nation, living in the inland areas of southern California.direct–inverse languages also have the antipassive voice. Somewhat less conventionally, markers that reduce a verb's transitivity by syntactically eliminating objects or demoting them to oblique arguments in accusative languages such as Swedish, Russian or some Turkic languages have recently been described by many linguists as antipassive as well.
The antipassive voice is very rare in active–stative languages generally and in nominative–accusative languages that have only one-place or no verbal agreement. There are a very few exceptions to this rule, such as Krongo and the Songhay languageKoyraboro Senni, both of which rely on dedicated antipassive markers that are rare in the more typical type of language with an antipassive.
Examples
K'iche'
In the
Mayan
Mayan most commonly refers to:
* Maya peoples, various indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and northern Central America
* Maya civilization, pre-Columbian culture of Mesoamerica and northern Central America
* Mayan languages, language family spoken ...
language
K'iche' K'iche', K'ichee', or Quiché may refer to:
* K'iche' people of Guatemala, a subgroup of the Maya
*K'iche' language, a Maya language spoken by the K'iche' people
**Classical K'iche' language, the 16th century form of the K'iche' language
*Kʼicheʼ ...
, the core arguments of a clause are unmarked for case, and are cross-referenced by person markers on the verb. Person marking follows an ergative–absolutive pattern. Non-core participants are expressed by prepositional phrases.
In the following transitive clause, the object "your mother" is the absolutive argument. It is unmarked for case and is not overtly cross-referenced, since the absolutive third person singular prefix is zero. The agent "you" is represented by the ergative second person singular prefix ''a-''.
In the corresponding antipassive clause, which is formally intransitive, the verb takes the antipassive suffix ''-on''. The original object "your mother" is now expressed by a prepositional phrase, while the agent "you" has become the subject argument and is thus expressed by the absolutive second person singular prefix ''at-''.
Basque
Basque
Basque may refer to:
* Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France
* Basque language, their language
Places
* Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France
* Basque Country (autonomous co ...
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.
when transformed using the antipassive voice, becomes:
Function
Antipassives often have functions that are analogous to those of passives in nominative-accusative languages, albeit 'in reverse':Willi, Andreas. 2018. ''Origins of the Greek verb'', pp. 534-535, OUP, and references therein.
* They may show that the agent is more relevant than the patient, i.e. that the patient is less relevant, e.g. because it is indefinite or generic, or the construction can be a way of omitting the patient altogether (which may otherwise even be ungrammatical in certain ergative languages). For example, antipassives may be used in sentences that translate to 'The dog bites (people in general)' or 'The dog bit ''a'' man'. This can be compared with the use of the passive in nominative-accusative languages such as English to deemphasise or omit the ''agent'': 'The man was bitten (by a dog)' or 'The man is often bitten'.
* They may show that the focus is on something else than the actual result of the action. For example, the focus may be on the agent's general propensity to perform the action, as in 'John makes great cakes'. Alternatively, the patient may be only incompletely affected, as in 'John is pulling at the chair', as opposed to 'John is pulling the chair'.
* They may be a way of avoiding atypical mapping between the relative or absolute animacy level of an argument and its syntactic function. Specifically, they may prevent the casting of a highly animate argument as an object in the absolutive case and/or of a low-animacy argument as a subject in the ergative case. For example, a sentence translating to 'The falling lamp hit John' may be paraphrased as something akin to 'The falling lamp hit at John'. This can be compared with the English use of the passive in 'John was hit by the falling lamp'.
A further purpose of antipassive construction is often to make certain arguments available as pivots for
relativization
In complexity theory and computability theory, an oracle machine is an abstract machine used to study decision problems. It can be visualized as a Turing machine with a black box, called an oracle, which is able to solve certain problems in a ...
, coordination of sentences, or similar constructions.Willi, Andreas. 2018. ''Origins of the Greek verb'', pp. 587-588, OUP, and references therein. For example, in Dyirbal the omitted argument in conjoined sentences must be in
absolutive case
In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative ...
. Thus, the following sentence is ungrammatical:
In the conjoined sentence, the omitted argument (the man) would have to be in
ergative case
In grammar, the ergative case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that identifies the noun as the agent of a transitive verb in ergative–absolutive languages.
Characteristics
In such languages, the ergative case is typically marked (most ...
, 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:
In addition, antipassives frequently convey aspectual, modal and temporal information. They are preferred in
imperfective
The imperfective (abbreviated or more ambiguously ) is a grammatical aspect used to describe ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a g ...
, inceptive, potential, purposive and non-past-tense clauses and may hence signal that the clause belongs to these types. This is connected to the antipassives' general focus on the agent, which makes them frequent in clauses where the agent is in control of the action or the action depends on the proneness of the agent to perform it.
Defining "antipassive"
The term ''antipassive'' is applied to a wide range of grammatical structures and is therefore difficult to define.
R. M. W. Dixon
Robert Malcolm Ward "Bob" Dixon (born 25 January 1939, in Gloucester, England) is a Professor of Linguistics in the College of Arts, Society, and Education and The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland. He is also Deputy Director o ...
has nonetheless proposed four criteria for determining whether a construction is an antipassive:Dixon, R.M.W. (1994). ''Ergativity''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
# It applies to clauses containing traditionally transitive predicates and forms a derived intransitive.
# The agent takes the subject role.
# The object takes a peripheral role in the clause, getting marked by a non-core case/preposition/etc. This can be omitted, but there's always the option of including it.
# There is some explicit marking of the construction.
While the first, second and fourth criterion are widely accepted, Dixon's formulation of the third criterion is controversial, in that many linguists consider as antipassives also constructions that give ''no'' option of including the object.
Historical origin
The antipassive construction is often signalled by the same markers as the reflexive and reciprocal constructions, the unifying feature being a reduction in transitivity. Indeed, it is more common for languages to have a coincidence of the antipassive marker with other markers than to have a specialised antipassive marker. In this connection, it has also been argued that even nominative-accusative languages such as Swedish and Russian can be said to have antipassives (Swedish ''hunden bit-s'' 'the dog bites (in general, unspecified patient)', Russian ''sobaka kusaet-sja'' ('ditto'); both have markers originating from a reflexive pronoun, and a similar origin of antipassives is attested in Pama-Nguyan, Kartvelian,
Chukotko-Kamchatkan
The Chukotko-Kamchatkan or Chukchi–Kamchatkan languages are a language family of extreme northeastern Siberia. Its speakers traditionally were indigenous hunter-gatherers and reindeer-herders. Chukotko-Kamchatkan is endangered. The Kamchatkan ...
and
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turkic l ...
Rgyalrong languages
Gyalrong or rGyalrong (), also rendered Jiarong (), or sometimes Gyarung, is a subbranch of the Gyalrongic languages spoken by the Gyalrong people in Western Sichuan, China. Lai et al. (2020) refer to this group of languages as East Gyalrongic. ...
, where the antipassive prefixes appear to derive from denominal derivations, the development being "transitive verb > derived action noun > new derived intransitive verb", and a similar process is claimed to have taken place in Western Mande languages, where the intransitive verb was formed by adding the verb 'to do' ('to buy' > 'a purchase' > 'to do a purchase'). Origin from combinations of deverbal nominalizations or participles and verbalizing postbases has also been claimed for
West Greenlandic
West Greenlandic ( da, vestgrønlandsk), also known as Kalaallisut, is the primary language of Greenland and constitutes the Greenlandic language, spoken by the vast majority of the inhabitants of Greenland, as well as by thousands of Greenland ...