Voice and voice alternations

Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (1)

1 SFL - Structures Formelles du Langage

In the transition from Latin to Early Romance the synthetic passive forms were lost, followed by a restructuring of the voice system. The reinterpretation of originally perfective passive forms as imperfective passive resulted in a periphrastic be-passive that was ambiguous between an imperfective and a perfective reading. This ambiguity favoured the rise of innovated passive auxiliaries that grammaticalised from verbs such as venire ‘come’, fieri ‘become’, facere ‘do', stare ‘stand'. In parallel, Romance languages generalised argument reduction processes using the weakened reflexive se/si (from Latin sibi) and developed pronominal agent-backgrounding strategies, based on 3pl and 2sg personal pronouns, the numeral one and the noun homo ‘man".

Mots clés: voice; passive auxiliaries; reflexive passives; passives; impersonal constructions; middles; anticausatives

Domaines: Linguistique

Patricia Cabredo Hofherr. Voice and voice alternations. Stark, Elisabeth & Dufter, Andreas. Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax, de Gruyter, pp.230-271, 2017, 978-3-11-037708-8. ⟨halshs-01353910⟩