An antipassive construction is a derived detransitivized construction with a two-place predicate, related to a corresponding transitive construction whose predicate is the same lexical item. In the basic transitive construction, the patient-like argument is realized as a direct object; in the antipassive construction, that argument is either suppressed (left implicit) or realized as an oblique ...

In addition to the transitive and intransitive, ergative languages of the Polynesian group commonly have another type of construction, which is called middle. The middle construction stands somewhere in between the transitive and the intransitive. It involves two arguments, but crucially is syntactically intransitive. The subject appears in ABS, not ERG. The logical object appears in some obliq...

This paper investigates some of the properties of passivization, antipassivization, and two types of causatives in the Tarramiutut subdialect of Inuktitut, within the Role and Reference Grammar framework. Data from the use of the floated quantifier, “atuniit”, as well as interclausal binding will be used to suggest that NPs which express arguments in constructions which, in their most canonical...

In this paper, I show how these specificity effects are accounted for straightforwardly in the analysis of Tagalog morphosyntax and phrase structure proposed by Aldridge (in preparation). Under this analysis, absolutive DPs receive a presuppositional interpretation because they are located outside VP at LF and mapped to the restrictive clause, in the sense of Diesing (1992). Oblique DPs, on the...