A Cognitive Grammar Approach to the Antipassive Construction in English

Abstract

As a grammatical category, the antipassive in English is often seen in the discourse but has not been widely studied in contrast to the passive. For one thing, the construction used to be regarded as being exclusive to ergative-absolutive languages. For another, the binary voice division in many traditional grammar books has precluded ESL and EFL learners from being exposed to fine-grained classification of voice construction. Given this, this paper aims to address the English antipassive construction from the perspective of cognitive grammar. It is argued that the antipassive has discrete features and is not confined to one single construction; instead, several constructions instantiate the antipassive in at least five ways: (i) object deletion or suppression, (ii) conative construction or preposition drop alternation, (iii) object incorporation, (iv) plural, indefinite, or non-referring objects, and (v) non-fact modalities. In terms of the prototypicality of the construction, type (i), type (ii), and type (iii) are more typical antipassives as they involve a shift of transitivity. In terms of continuous features, type (iv) and type (v) can be taken as non-typical antipassives or overlaps with the active in that they only exhibit the characteristics of the antipassive semantically. Thus, it is reasonable to say that both the active and antipassive are counterparts of the passive.