Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Antipassive constructions in Jê languages: typological convergences and divergences (Miranda & Sansò)
This week's paper talks about antipassives in Jê languages, a language family from Brazil. While we've already discussed applicatives and causatives, there hasn't been a paper on antipassives on TyPoW. "Antipassive" refers to a valency-modifying operation in which the object is either ommitted completely or demoted to oblique status, thus decreasing the verb's valency by one. If you want some more examples for antipassive constructions, check out the Wikipedia page here. Now onto the prompts:
- Does your language feature antipassive constructions?
- If so, how does it handle the demoted O? Is it omitted, does it take an oblique role?
- How does the antipassive interact with other morphosyntactic constructions (e.g. causatives)?
- How are antipassives used in conversations? Are there any particular pragmatics attached to them?
- If you considered diachronics when creating your language, how did antipassives arise?
- If your language doesn't feature antipassives, what other kinds of valency-decreasing processes are there (e.g. passives)?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!