The Un-Passive Voice: The Antipassive Construction

In the world of grammar, you’ve probably met the usual suspects. There’s the active voice, our default, direct way of speaking: “The linguist wrote the article.” Then there’s its more reserved sibling, the passive voice, which shifts the focus: “The article was written by the linguist.” For most English speakers, that’s where the story of grammatical voice ends. But what if I told you there’s a third voice, a bizarre mirror-image of the passive lurking in languages across the globe? A voice that, instead of demoting the subject, demotes the object?

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the antipassive construction. It’s a true mind-bender that challenges our fundamental assumptions about how sentences are built, and it offers a fascinating glimpse into the sheer diversity of human language.

A Quick Detour: What’s an Ergative Language?

Before we can tackle the antipassive, we need to make a quick stop in a different kind of linguistic universe: the land of ergative-absolutive languages. English, like most European languages, is a nominative-accusative language. It sounds complex, but the idea is simple. We treat the subject of a sentence the same way, regardless of whether the verb has an object.

Consider these sentences:

• She slept. (Subject of an intransitive verb—no object)
• She read the book. (Subject of a transitive verb—has an object)

In both cases, “She” is the subject, and it’s in the nominative case. The object, “the book”, is in the accusative case (though in modern English, we only see this distinction in pronouns like she/her, he/him, etc.). We group the subject of an intransitive verb (S) and the subject of a transitive verb (A, for Agent) together.

Ergative-absolutive languages flip this logic. They group the subject of an intransitive verb (S) with the object of a transitive verb (P, for Patient). The subject of a transitive verb (A) is the one that gets special treatment.

• Nominative-Accusative (English): {S and A} are treated the same; {P} is different.
• Ergative-Absolutive (e.g., Basque, Yupik): {S and P} are treated the same (absolutive case); {A} is different (ergative case).

So, in an ergative language, the “she” in “She slept” would be marked the same way as “the book” in “He read the book.” The “he” would get a special “ergative” marker. This core difference is precisely why the antipassive voice exists.

Enter the Antipassive: Demoting the Object

Now that we have the background, let’s return to voice. Remember how the passive voice works in English:

• Active: The cat (A) chased the mouse (P).
• Passive: The mouse (P) was chased [by the cat (A)].

The passive voice promotes the Patient/Object (the mouse) to the main subject role and demotes the Agent/Subject (the cat) to an optional phrase. It makes the verb intransitive (or at least reduces its arguments).

The antipassive does the exact opposite. It takes the Agent/Subject (A), which is in the special ergative case, and shifts it into the “normal” absolutive case, making it grammatically equivalent to the subject of an intransitive verb. In doing so, it must demote the Patient/Object (P).

Here’s the breakdown:

1. The verb changes from transitive to intransitive, often with a special antipassive suffix.
2. The Agent (subject of the transitive verb) moves from the ergative case to the absolutive case.
3. The Patient (object) is either deleted entirely or moved into an oblique case (like a prepositional phrase: “with a book”, “about the mouse”, etc.).

If the passive voice says, “Let’s focus on what was acted upon”, the antipassive says, “Let’s focus on the actor and the action itself, and make the thing being acted upon less important.”

Let’s See It in Action: Examples from Around the World

This is all very abstract, so let’s look at some concrete examples.

Dyirbal (Australia)

Dyirbal, an Aboriginal Australian language, is famous in linguistics for its clear-cut ergative system and its use of the antipassive. (Note: examples are simplified for clarity).

• Transitive (Ergative): Bayi yara bangun dugumbilgu buran.
  “The man saw the woman.”
  • yara (man) is in the ergative case (marked by -ŋu, combined here with the marker ba-). It’s the Agent (A).
  • dugumbil (woman) is in the absolutive case. It’s the Patient (P).
• Antipassive: Bayi yara buran-ŋay dugumbilgu.
  “The man was seeing/looking towards the woman.”
  • yara (man) is now in the absolutive case (marked by bayi). It’s treated like the subject of an intransitive verb.
  • The verb buran (see) gets the antipassive suffix -ŋay.
  • dugumbil (woman) is now in an oblique case (dative/locative). She is no longer the direct object.

The focus shifts from “the act of seeing the woman” to “the man’s activity of seeing.” The woman becomes secondary information.

Central Alaskan Yup’ik (Alaska)

Yup’ik provides another excellent example of this transformation.

• Transitive (Ergative): Angutem neqa nerraa.
  “The man ate the food.”
  • Angutem (man) is in the ergative case.
  • neqa (food) is in the absolutive case.
  • The verb ending -aa shows a transitive relationship between a 3rd person subject and a 3rd person object.
• Antipassive: Angun ner’uq neqmek.
  “The man ate some food / was eating.”
  • Angun (man) is now in the absolutive case.
  • neqmek (food) is now in an oblique case (the ablative, meaning something like “from/of food”). It implies an indefinite or partial object.
  • The verb ending -uq is an intransitive ending, agreeing only with its single absolutive subject.

But… Why? The Function of the Antipassive

Languages don’t develop complex grammatical structures just for fun. The antipassive serves several crucial functions.

1. To Shift Focus onto the Agent: The most common function is to foreground the subject and their action. The antipassive is used when the specific identity of the object is irrelevant, unknown, or generic. It’s the difference between “I shot the bear” (focus on the specific target) and “I was shooting” (focus on the activity).

2. To Make the Agent the “Pivot” of a Sentence: In many ergative languages, you can only chain clauses together or form complex sentences if the shared noun is in the absolutive case. The absolutive argument is the “pivot.” So if you want to say, “The man saw the woman and [the man] left”, you can’t do it easily if “man” is in the ergative case in the first clause. You use the antipassive to put “man” into the absolutive case, allowing him to serve as the pivot for both clauses. It’s a key tool for building discourse.

3. To Allow “Object Incorporation”: Sometimes, the demoted object gets fully incorporated into the verb itself. For example, in Chukchi (a Siberian language), you can go from a sentence meaning “I killed a whale” to an antipassive one that literally translates to “I whale-killed.” The object loses its status as a separate noun and becomes part of the action.

Expanding Your Linguistic Horizons

The antipassive voice is more than just a piece of grammatical trivia. It’s a powerful reminder that the subject-verb-object structure we take for granted is just one of many ways to organize reality. It shows us that other languages have grammaticalized concepts that English expresses differently, often through word choice (“was eating” vs. “ate the food”) or intonation.

So the next time you use the passive voice, take a moment to appreciate its strange, inverted cousin. The antipassive is a testament to the fact that for every grammatical strategy we find familiar, there’s another out there, operating on a completely different logic, just waiting to bend our minds.