Typology of coding patterns and frequency effects of antipassives
Ilja A. Seržant | Leipzig University
Katarzyna Maria Janic | Leipzig University
Darja Dermaku | Leipzig University
Frequency asymmetries within a minimal grammatical domain create offline associations that languages tend to exploit for a
more efficient encoding. We explore cross-linguistic coding patterns of antipassives. We first argue that antipassive markers tend to have
properties of derivational markers. Secondly, we show that antipassives are considerably rarer than the basic transitive constructions. The
lower frequency correlates with the length of coding: antipassives tend to be coded with longer forms than basic transitive verbs. Thirdly,
we explore frequency associations of different lexical input types and find that it is the rare input types that tend to select the
antipassive, if the marking is differential, while the frequent ones correlate with the unmarked verb (A-lability). We, furthermore, show
that the rarer argument types and argument scenarios correlate stronger with antipassives than the more frequent argument types and
scenarios.
Keywords: antipassive, frequency asymmetry, efficiency, P-backgrounding
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 06 January 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.20049.ser
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.20049.ser
Full-text
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