Chapter in:
Antipassive: Typology, diachrony, and related constructions
Edited by Katarzyna Janic and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich
[Typological Studies in Language 130] 2021

Polyfunctional vanka- in Nivaĉle and the antipassive category

| University of Formosa | CONICET
| University of Oregon | SIL International
Nivaĉle (Mataguayan) is a non-ergative language of Argentina and Paraguay. It has a voice/valency mechanism that resembles an antipassive. Stell (1989: 310) refers to vanka- as an intransitive marker. Fabre (2015, 2016) glosses vanka- as ‘antipassive’ but does not provide an in-depth analysis. We examine vanka- as an antipassive marker, but also its connection to other functional domains and its use with certain intransitive stems. On intransitive stems, its semantic effects range from strongly agentive to middle meaning. It implies that there is an extra but unexpressible ‘non-specific participant’ in the context. The extra participant implication suggests that vanka- may originate in a third-person marker va- plus a ‘cislocative’ or ‘middle’ n-, plus a ka- which may correspond to an ‘indirect possessive’ formative.
Keywords: middle, impersonal, non-ergative, split-S, Mataguayan
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