On the Reflexive-Antipassive Polysemy: Typological Convergence from Unrelated Languages

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This paper deals with the antipassive construction that has raised considerable interest in the syntactic description of ergative languages over the last few decades (Dixon 1979). Often defined on structural grounds, antipassive is said to be a derived intransitive construction with a two-place predicate, the object argument of which is either suppressed or realized as an oblique (Polinsky 2005). Tradition-ally, the antipassive is related to the ergative system. Although some authors insist on the link between the antipassive and ergativity (Dixon 1979, Cooreman 1993), certain typologically-oriented publications extend discussions on antipassive phenomena to accusative languages (Heath 1976, Polinsky 2005, Creissels 2006).