Chapter 9
Antipassive derivation in Soninke (West Mande)
Soninke, a West Mande language spoken in Mali,
Mauritania, Gambia, and Senegal, provides crucial support to the
view that accusative languages may have fully productive antipassive
derivations. In Soninke, the distinction between transitive and
intransitive predication is particularly clearcut. The alignment
between transitive and intransitive predication is neutral in
indexation, but accusative in flagging, and accusative alignment is
found in constituent order too. Soninke has two verbal suffixes that
can be involved in antipassivization defined as a morphologically
marked alternation by which transitive verbs are converted into
intransitive verbs whose sole core argument fulfills the same
semantic role as the A argument of the transitive verbs from which
they derive. One of these two suffixes is a dedicated antipassive
suffix, whereas the other is a multifunction detransitivizing suffix
acting as an antipassive marker with a limited number of verbs. In
Soninke, there is no interaction between antipassive and aspect, and
there is no constraint restricting the use of the antipassive form
of transitive verbs to the encoding of habitual events or
stereotyped activities either. Antipassive constructions can refer
to specific events, provided no specific patient is mentioned. In
Soninke, null objects are not allowed, only a tiny minority of
transitive verbs can be used intransitively with a subject
representing their agentive argument, and the high productivity of
antipassive derivation follows from the use of derived intransitive
verbs as the preferred strategy for not specifying the patientive
argument of transitive verbs. Diachronically, there is evidence that
the multipurpose detransitivizing suffix acting as an antipassive
marker with a limited number of verbs was originally a reflexive
marker, whereas the dedicated antipassive suffix results from the
grammaticalization of a verb ‘do’ in a cross-linguistically common
type of antipassive periphrasis.
Article outline
-
1.Introduction
- 2.Some basic aspects of Soninke clause structure
- 2.1Transitive and intransitive verbal predication
- 2.2Indexation and flagging of core syntactic terms
- 2.3Alignment
- 2.4Oblique arguments
- 2.5Transitivity marking
- 3.Constraints on the expression of subjects and objects, and on the
intransitive use of transitive verbs
- 4.The derivational suffixes involved in antipassive
constructions
- 4.1The detransitivizing suffix -i
- 4.2The antipassive suffix -ndì ~ -ndí
-
5.The function and semantics of antipassive derivation
- 6.Antipassive and object incorporation
- 7.Causativization of antipassive verbs and antipassivization of
causative verbs
- 8.The origin of the suffixes involved in antipassivization
- 9.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
Abbreviations
-
References
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