Ebook: Voice syncretism

This book is a typological study of resemblance in formal verbal marking between two or more of the following seven clausal constructions: passives, antipassives, reflexives, reciprocals, anticausatives, causatives, and applicatives. Following Malchukov (2015; 2016; 2017), Creissels (2016), and Zúñiga & Kittilä (2019),
these constructions are called voices. In turn, their formal marking is called
voice marking, and any resemblance in voice marking is called voice syncretism. The latter term here denotes resemblance in formal marking regardless
of whether the marking in two or more voices is related semantically and/or diachronically (Zúñiga & Kittilä 2019: 233f.). Thus, the term refers strictly to the
polyfunctionality or coexpression of voice marking (Haspelmath 2019: 21). As
discussed in Chapter 2, voice itself has been a topic of much debate and innumerable definitions of the seven voices mentioned above have been proposed
in the literature. Many definitions rely on notions like an argument-adjunct distinction, transitivity, grammatical roles and/or an active voice that are intuitively
clear yet difficult to apply to different languages in a uniform manner. The sheer
amount of literature dedicated to capturing the essence of the individual notions
testifies to their elusive nature, and there does not seem to be any consensus
as to how they are best defined for use in cross-linguistic investigations (§2.1).
Rather than attempting to (re)define the notions once again, this book employs
alternative voice definitions that avoid the notions altogether. The definitions instead rely solely on i) a comparison of two clausal constructions, ii) the number
of semantic participants in the constructions, iii) the semantic roles of certain
semantic participants in the constructions, and iv) the formal verbal marking of
the constructions (§2.2). Observe that this book covers only voices that are formally marked on the verb, while periphrastic constructions of various kinds are
largely excluded from the discussion.