Antipassive voice

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The antipassive voice is a verb voice found mostly in ergative languages. Like the passive voice, the antipassive decreases the verb's valency by one.

The antipassive works on transitive verbs by deleting the object (marked with the absolutive case) and changing the agent from ergative to absolutive.

"Mary-ERG eats pie-ABS." → "Mary-ABS eats."

"He-ERG is telling the truth-ABS." → "He-ABS is talking."

As with passive voice, the deleted argument can be re-introduced as an optional complement or oblique argument.

"Mary-ERG eats pie-ABS." → "Mary-ABS eats from the pie."

Antipassives frequently convey aspectual or modal information, and may cast the clause as imperfective, inceptive, or potential.

[edit] Examples from Basque

Basque has an antipassive voice, which puts the agent into the absolutive case, but does not delete the absolutive object. This leads to the agent and object being in the same case.

Gauza miragarriak ikusi ditut (nik)

thing wonderful-PL-ABS see-PERF have-PRES-PL-I (I-ERG)

I have seen wonderful things.

when transformed using the antipassive voice, becomes:

Gauza miragarriak ikusirik nago / ikusia naiz

thing wonderful-PL-ABS see-PERF-STAT am / see-PERF-ACT am