Typology of passive lability
A small typological project on passive lability (a.k.a. uncoded passive alternations).
This is a small project dealing with the typology of morphologically uncoded passive alternations or passive lability. It originates from my work on the Northwest Caucasian languages, in particular, on Abaza, and has started from a short paper I wrote in 2023 for the volume in memory of my friend Sasha Vydrina, who has published on this topic in Kakabe, a language of the Mande family in West Africa. Passive lability is widespread in the Mande languages and West Africa in general, however, it has not yet been studied from a cross-linguistic perspective. In this project, I aim at collecting data on passive lability from as many languages in which it is documented as possible and to explore its distribution across genealogical groupings and areas as well as its cross-linguistic variation along a number of parameters.
Materials
Arkadiev, Peter. 2018. От результатива к пассиву: данные западнокавказских языков (From resultative to passive: evidence from the Northwest Caucasian languages). Типология морфосинтаксических параметров 2018, 1, 31–50. pdf
Arkadiev, Peter. 2023. Unmarked resultatives in Abaza and passive lability. In: Nina Sumbatova, Ivan Kapitonov, Maria Khachaturyan, Sofia Oskolskaya & Samira Verhees (eds.), Songs and Trees: Papers in Memory of Sasha Vydrina. St. Petersburg: Institute of Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, pp. 485–505. pdf
Arkadiev, Peter. 2023. Типологически нетривиальная результативная конструкция в абазинском языке (A typologically non-trivial resultative construction in Anaza). Доклад на Чтениях памяти В. П. Недялкова, ИЛИ РАН (онлайн), 22 ноября 2023. pdf
Arkadiev, Peter. 2023. A preliminary typology of morphologically uncoded passives. Talk at the workshop The Word, Alignment, Valency: In honour of Fernando Zúñiga, Bern, 2 December 2023. pdf
Arkadiev, Peter. 2024. Towards a typology of passive lability with special reference to Abaza. Presentation at the seminar of the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, HSE University, Moscow (online), 25 June 2024. pdf
Arkadiev, Peter. 2025. Towards a typology of passive lability. Talk at the Workshop “Transitivity and labile verbs in typological and diachronic perspectives” at the 58th Annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Bordeaux, 26-29 August 2025. pdf