Polyfunctional vanka- in Nivacle and the antipassive category

VIDAL, ALEJANDRA; PAYNE, DORIS

Antipassive. Typology, diachrony and related constructions.

John Benjamins.Typological Studies in Language

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2021; p. 349 - 381

Nivacle (Mataguayan) is a non-ergative language of Argentina and Paraguay. It has a voice/valency mechanism that resembles an antipassive. Stell (1989: 310) refers to vanka- as an intransitive marker. Fabre (2015, 2016) glosses vanka- as antipassive but does not provide an in-depth analysis. We examine vanka- as an antipassive marker, but also its connection to other functional domains and its use with certain intransitive stems. On intransitive stems, its semantic effects range from strongly agentive to middle meaning. It implies that there is an extra but unexpressible non-specific participant in the context. The extra participant implication suggests that vanka- may originate in a third-person marker va- plus a cislocative or middle n-, plus a ka- which may correspond to an indirect possessive formative.