Voice Syncretism Crosslinguistically: The View from Minimalism

Despina Oikonomou,Artemis Alexiadou

doi:10.3390/philosophies7010019

Despina Oikonomou, Artemis Alexiadou

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7010019

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Journal: Philosophies	Publication Date: Feb 16, 2022
Citations: 3	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University of Bern

Abstract

Voice syncretism is widely attested crosslinguistically. In this paper, we discuss three different types of Voice syncretism, under which the same morpheme participates in different configurations. We provide an approach under which the same Voice head can convey different interpretations depending on the environment it appears in, thus building on the notion of allosemy. We show that, in all cases under investigation, allosemy is closely associated with the existence of idiosyncratic patterns. By contrast, we notice that allosemy and idiosyncrasy are not present in analytic passive and causative constructions across different languages. We argue that the distinguishing feature between the two types of constructions is whether the passive and the causative interpretation comes from the Voice head, thus forming a single domain with the vP or whether passive and causative semantics are realized by distinct heads above the Voice layer, thus forming two distinct domains.

Highlights

Philosophies 2022, 7, 19 within the Distributed Morphology framework [11,12,13,14,15,16], we argue that the syncretic morphemes are Voice heads in the sense that, at least partially, they convey some information about the external argument
We focus on languages in which the antipassive shares the same morphology with the reflexive, anticausative and passive presenting a case of antipassive plus type A syncretism
We put forth a hypothesis under which this is only epiphenomenal. We argue that both the internal and the external argument are affected in the antipassive construction

Summary

Introduction

Philosophies 2022, 7, 19 within the Distributed Morphology framework [11,12,13,14,15,16], we argue that the syncretic morphemes are Voice heads in the sense that, at least partially, they convey some information about the external argument In this way, we tackle the question of multifunctionality from a compositional perspective. We argue that the analytic constructions under discussion involve an additional passive/causative head above the Voice layer, forming two domains instead and preventing vP dependency and idiosyncrasies (following [1,2] that Voice in Greek (and other “middle” languages) is lower than the so called passive Voice head in English [19]. We conclude with open questions and further ways to restrict the proposed analysis

Background

Voice Syncretism within a Phasal Account