The Dog Bites: On the “Aggressive” Antipassive in Slavic and Baltic

Abstract Several Slavic and Baltic languages have an “aggressive” antipassive construction, where in a reflexive marker is used to mark object omission. The construction often carries habitual or potential aspectual meanings and is restricted to a small group of verbs. This study examines the lexical restrictions of the constructions across a sample of 11 Slavic and Baltic languages, with a special focus on Russian. The results show that across the languages, the construction is used to express a set of concepts, of which ‘hit’ and ‘push’ are the most prototypical. Verbs used in the antipassive express unwanted action on an animate patient, and they also share features of inherent atelicity and potential reciprocality. All languages in the survey display syncretism of reciprocal and antipassive markers, resulting in ambiguous plural subject constructions. Based on this, it is suggested that the “aggressive” antipassive with animate subjects has grammaticalized from the reciprocal function of the reflexive marker. Lexical semantics hence play an important role in the extension of functions of reflexive markers in these languages.