Abstract
Existing semantic analyses of the antipassive morpheme capture scope facts but are unable to handle the non-culminating event reading which is found in Australian languages (among others). I develop a meaning for the antipassive that is able to capture this reading, and also account for the unexpected high-volitionality reading also found in some Australian languages. Finally, I turn to a typologically rare situation in two languages in which the antipassive construction is interpreted as denoting a culminated event with a fully affected object. I provide an account for this and show that there are formal similarities between the two kinds of antipassive, which may explain why the antipassive operator is used in the latter case even though it produces an interpretation of events which is apparently opposite to the more common non-culminating reading.
Highlights
The aim of this paper is to develop a formal semantic account of the antipassive operator (AP) as it occurs in Australian languages that is able to account for the various meanings conveyed by the antipassive construction
In this paper I have sought to develop the property-type analysis of the antipassive operator to account for the common non-culminating, non-affected object readings that are found in Australian languages
I proposed that AP1 contains the same STAGE relation that Landman (1992) proposed for the English progressive and that this, along with an appropriate modality, is able to account for the range of readings attested in Australian languages with accomplishment and achievement verbs
Summary
The aim of this paper is to develop a formal semantic account of the antipassive operator (AP) as it occurs in Australian languages that is able to account for the various meanings conveyed by the antipassive construction. In contrast with a corresponding transitive, antipassive clauses may have the following readings: non- or partially-affected object, no referential object, non-culminated, iterative, habitual, potential or desired events These functions are typical in cross-linguistic typological surveys of antipassives, the descriptions and details vary considerably (Heath, 1976; Hopper & Thompson, 1980; Foley & Van Valin, 1985; Cooreman, 1994; Givón, 1994; Spreng, 2010; Polinsky, 2017). Another reading that is exceptional for both formal and functional reasons is found in two Australian languages; in these languages the antipassive has a fully-affected, culminated reading with an object that appears to be headed by the universal quantifier. JESSICA DENNISS the same type as the first, and which preserves the analysis of the object as a property that is existentially closed within vP
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