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

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.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