Bivalency and Intransitivity

Antipassives and the Syntax of Voice
One of the few full-length, theoretical treatments of the antipassive construction, this book provides an in-depth study of antipassives and their interaction with applicatives and causatives in natural language, three constructions that have long represented a puzzle to syntacticians. It argues that the antipassive reveals more about the introduction of the external argument than the demotion or elimination of the direct object, and demonstrates that there are at least two types of antipassives:Voice antipassives and verbalizing antipassives. Other valency-changing phenomena, like the applicative, causative, and reflexive, and their interaction with the antipassive, are also addressed. The book takes a cross-linguistic view and includes data from the Central Alaskan Yup’ik, Halkomelem Salish, Yidi, Diyari, Russian, and Latvian, among others. Providing an up-to-date theoretical analysis of antipassives wi