The development of antipassive constructions in Australian languages*

Abstract

Antipassive constructions occur in a small minority of Australian languages. The overwhelming majority of these antipassive constructions are marked by the same verbal morphology that each language uses to mark its reflexive construction. This paper compares the functional properties of antipassives and reflexives, in order to suggest a historical explanation for their shared morphology, and proposes that antipassive constructions in these languages developed from reflexive constructions through a diachronic process of functional extension and reanalysis. Further, a chain of extensions and reanalyses is proposed, whereby it is suggested that reflexives provided the source material for so‐called pragmatic antipassives, which in turn provided the source material for structural antipassives.