2497: Antipassive Voice Oct 13, 2021

People might be familiar with the active and passive voice—and fans of Word Facts may remember discussion of the passival [1]—but less likely to be acquainted with the antipassive voice. This doesn't really exist in Indo-European languages, and instead is a feature mostly of ergative-absolutive languages [2]. The reason for this is that while the passive voice deletes the agent and promotes the object to be the subject, the antipassive operates by deleting the object of the sentence, and promoting the agent. This might sound like it would just be a normal active form then—hence the term 'antipassive'—but in ergative-absolutive languages, the subject takes different endings depending upon whether there is an object of the verb. In this way, the antipassive promotes a noun that would take the ergative case to be in the absolutive.

[2] https://www.wordfacts.org/blog/2017/10/1048-no-subjects-in-ergative-languages.html