Unspecified participant; A case of antipassive in Ainu

This paper shows that there are two synchronically distinct i-markers in Ainu, viz. the derivational antipassive i- A nd inflectional 'fourth' person object i-with the functions of first person plural inclusive, second person honorific, and logophoric. The derivational antipassive marker i-'person/thing' can be regarded as an antipassive marker per se based on its syntactic (eliminating a patient/theme/recipient argument), semantic (denoting an unspecified generic participant or lexicalizing it to a single or subset of objects) and discourse (patient-defocusing) properties. Contrary to the accepted view, I adduce the 'antipassive to 1pl. incl.o' scenario based on extensive cross-linguistic and Ainu-internal evidence. The antipassive i-, in its turn, originated in the incorporation of a generic noun ∗i 'thing/place/time', which is not unusual in languages without overt expression of the demoted O participant in the antipassive. The extended use of the antipassive i-is attested on obligatorily possessed nouns to enable their use without possessive affixes. Finally, my corpus-based study of semantic classes of verbs with a predilection for antipassive derivation revealed that the antipassive in Ainu is most likely to apply to a 'middle section' of the semantic transitivity hierarchy since it belongs to the lower individuation of patients (LIP) type, which is assumed to be more typical of antipassives in non-ergative languages. c 2021 John Benjamins Publishing Company.