Festschrifts

Legate (2021) deconstructs passive into three characteristic properties – agent demotion, theme promotion, and morphological marking – and shows that these properties vary independently across languages. She concludes that this range of variation supports an approach, such as Minimalism, in which universal grammar includes no information specific to voice. This brief note takes a similar approach to antipassive, a clause type whose typology has been investigated by Polinsky (2017). I first deconstruct antipassive into two characteristic properties – demotion of the internal argument, which comes in several subvarieties, and voice marking – and then suggest that these properties vary independently across languages. The data are drawn primarily from Austronesian languages.