The antipassive in Kirundi

Abstract

The Kirundi verbal suffix -an is notably polysemous with three possible meanings: reciprocal, associative, and antipassive. The contexts in which the antipassive is ambiguous or distinct raise questions for -an’s syntactic and semantic analysis. In this paper, I examine new data which demonstrate that -an’s primary function is to add a relation between the verb and an implicit argument. These data support an analysis where -an is a specialized high applicative head (ApplREL) which adds the semantics of such a relation. The distribution of the different meanings is then accounted for by differential semantic selection and binding. This analysis thereby simplifies -an to its relational role and accounts for the ambiguous and non-ambiguous contexts that characterize the suffix. Additionally, this paper addresses various questions about -an’s antipassive status and potential issues with the applicative approach.