[Lingtyp] Workshop proposal at SLE 2027: The fringes of voice: Rare, non-prototypical, and understudied phenomena in voice marking
Tim Ongenae
Tim.Ongenae at UGent.be
Fri Oct 16 20:12:51 UTC 2026
Dear colleagues,
Niklas Wiskandt, Lidia Federica Mazzitelli, and I (Tim Ongenae) are preparing a workshop proposal for the 60th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Košice, Slovakia, 25–28 August 2027. Please find the workshop description below. The workshop is entitled ‘The fringes of voice: Rare, non-prototypical, and understudied phenomena in voice marking’.
If you are interested, please send us an abstract of up to 100 words by November 10, 2026. If the workshop is accepted, you will be asked to write a full abstract according to the SLE guidelines.
If you have any questions regarding the workshop, do not hesitate to contact us!
We are looking forward to receiving your contribution.
Best wishes,
Niklas, Lidia, and Tim
The fringes of voice
Rare, non-prototypical, and understudied phenomena in voice marking
Workshop proposal - the 60th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
Košice, Slovakia, 25–28 August 2027
Organizers
* Niklas Wiskandt (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf) – niklas.wiskandt at hhu.de
* Tim Ongenae (University of Texas at San Antonio / Ghent University) – tim.ongenae at ugent.be
* Lidia Federica Mazzitelli (University of Graz) – lidia.mazzitelli at uni-graz.at
Keywords: non-prototypical phenomena, syncretism, typology, valency, grammatical voice
Workshop profile
What is “voice”, and what is not? To achieve a comprehensive description of a functional domain, it is necessary to explore not just its core, but also its quirks and fringes. The proposed workshop will investigate these for the domain of voice, and thereby will contribute to our understanding of the voice domain as a whole.
Voice refers to any kind of formal marking (morphological, auxiliary verbs…) of valency alternations on the verb (Kulikov 2011; Zúñiga & Kittilä 2019; Creissels 2024; Haspelmath forthcoming). For example, English uses the auxiliary ‘be’ to mark the passive voice, as illustrated in (1).
(1) English
a. John cuts the bread.
b. The bread is cut (by John).
Voice markers can be valency-increasing (causative, applicative…), valency-decreasing (anticausative, passive, antipassive…), or valency-neutral (reflexive, reciprocal…). In addition, they can modify the semantic structure of the predicate (applicative, anticausative…) or simply rearrange the syntactic status of the arguments in the sentence (passive, antipassive…). Overt voice marking is often contrasted with the phenomenon of lability, i.e., the lack of formal marking for valency alternations (Kulikov & Lavidas 2014).
Typological research on voice often addresses particular subcategories of voice, e.g. passives, like (1) (e.g. Soboktka & Skrzypek 2026), applicatives, like (2) (e.g. Zúñiga & Creissels 2024), antipassives, like (3) (e.g. Janic & Witzlack-Makarevich 2021), reflexives, like (4) (e.g. Janic, Puddu & Haspelmath 2023), or anticausatives, like (5) (e.g. Inglese et al. 2026).
(2) German (Zúñiga, Arkadiev & Hegedűs 2024)
a. Die Regierung kämpf-te gegen das
art.sg.f.nom government fight-pst[3sg] against art.sg.n.acc
Parlament.
parliament
b. Die Regierung be-kämpf-te das
art.sg.f.nom government appl-fight-pst[3sg] art.sg.n.acc Parlament.
Parliament
Both: ‘The government fought against parliament.’
(3) Dyirbal (Dixon 1994: 10-13)
a. Yabu rjuma-rjgu bura-n
Mother:abs father-erg see-nonfut
b. Rjuma bural-rja-nyu yabu-gu
Father:abs see-antipass-nonfut mother-dat
both: ‘Father saw mother.’
(4) Turkish (Haspelmath 2023)
kurula-n-dı-m
dry-refl-pst-1sg
‘I dried myself’
(5) Latin (Ongenae 2026b)
a. Ne gul-am aut gurgulion-em
that_not throat-acc.f.sg or windpipe-acc.f.sg
rump-a-s
Break-sbjv.prs-2sg.act
‘[…] that you do not break the throat or the windpipe.’(Chiron 9, fourth century CE)
b. Rump-itur tot-um corpus.
Break-ind.prs.3sg.antic whole-nom.n.sg body.nom.n.sg
‘The whole body breaks.’ (Chiron 514, fourth century CE)
Recently, voice syncretism, i.e., the polyfunctionality of a single voice marker, has received considerable attention (Bahrt 2021; see Malchukov 2017 for a semantic map of syncretic voice markers). Several studies also investigate the emergence of voice markers and voice syncretism (e.g. Haspelmath 1990; Inglese 2023). These studies often focus on typologically common voice functions and markers that follow the prototypical definition of the voice markers in question.
However, several phenomena related to voice challenge our common understanding of voice: some appear in uncommon ways, e.g. as ambifixes or through reduplication, as in (6). Some are cross-linguistically frequent, but typologically underdescribed, e.g. voice marker stacking, as in (7) (see Creissels 2024: 349-355; Wiskandt 2026). Others behave differently in non-prototypical situations, e.g. detransitivizing constructions with a Force as Effector often oscillate between passive and anticausative constructions (Ongenae 2026a).
(6) North Kara (Mazzitelli 2025: 105)
A-kala ki=ka~kapis amawa.
Noun.marker-taro 3sg.sbj=red~plant tomorrow
‘Taro will be planted tomorrow.’
(7) Tswana (Creissels 2024: 350)
M̀pʰɔ̀ !ʊ-tɬáà-kwád-ís-éd-ìw-à lʊ-kwâːlɔ.
prn(cl1) is/a:cl1-fut-write-caus-appl-pass-fv sg-letter(cl11)
‘Someone will make someone else write a letter to Mpho.’
lit. ‘Mpho will be made written.to a letter.’
This workshop focuses on understudied and non-prototypical phenomena that challenge standard definitions, and more generally, voice markers that do not behave typically. We welcome papers discussing any non-prototypical and uncommon phenomena in the domain of voice marking. We accept both synchronically oriented descriptions of these phenomena as well as diachronically oriented papers exploring the origins and diachronic pathways that rendered them.
Possible topics to be addressed at the workshop include (but are not limited to):
* Voice markers with non-prototypical or unexpected functions or interpretations
* Voice markers that haven’t usually been classified as such
* Voice markers which have developed from unusual sources, or make use of unusual strategies (that is, morphosyntactic strategies we wouldn’t usually expect for voice marking)
* Rare patterns of voice syncretism or voice marker stacking
* Non-oppositional uses (e.g. deponents) and non-voice-related functions of voice markers
* Previously un(der)described voice phenomena in underdocumented languages
* Elements that look like voice markers at first but actually are not
* Diachronic and contact-related factors rendering non-prototypical uses or unexpected new functions of voice markers
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
We invite submission of short abstracts of up to 100 words (references not included), describing original, unpublished research related to the topics of the workshop. Please submit your abstracts in Word and PDF format to the workshop organizers. The deadline for submission of the short abstracts to the organizers is November 10.
If the workshop is accepted, participants will be notified by December 15 and asked to submit a full abstract of up to 500 words according to the SLE guidelines by January 15.
References
Bahrt, Nicklas N. 2021. Voice syncretism. Berlin: Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5948872.
Creissels, Denis. 2024. Transitivity, valency, and voice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198899594.001.0001.
Dixon, R. M. W. 1994. Ergativity (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 69). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1990. The grammaticization of passive morphology. Studies in Language 14(1). 25–72. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.14.1.03has.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2023. Comparing reflexive constructions in the world’s languages. In Katarzyna Janic, Nicoletta Puddu & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), Reflexive constructions in the world’s languages (Research on Comparative Grammar 3), 19–62. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.7874925.
Haspelmath, Martin. forthcoming. Valency and voice constructions (Cambridge Elements in Construction Grammar). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Inglese, Guglielmo. 2023. The rise of middle voice systems: A study in diachronic typology. Diachronica 40(2). 195–237. https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.20058.ing.
Inglese, Guglielmo, Giulia Mazzola & Eugenio Goria (eds.). 2026. Diachronic and typological perspectives on anticausativization (Typological Studies in Language volume 138). Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Janic, Katarzyna, Nicoletta Puddu & Martin Haspelmath (eds.). 2023. Reflexive constructions in the world’s languages (Research on Comparative Grammar 3). Berlin: Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7861660.
Janic, Katarzyna & Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (eds.). 2021. Antipassive: Typology, diachrony, and related constructions (Typological Studies in Language). Vol. 130. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.130.
Kulikov, Leonid. 2011. Voice typology. In Jae J. Song (ed.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic typology, 368–398. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199281251.013.0019.
Kulikov, Leonid & Nikolaos Lavidas (eds.). 2014. Typology of labile verbs: Focus on diachrony. Linguistics 52(4).
Malchukov, Andrej L. 2017. Markedness effects in applicative formation. In Albert Álvarez González & Ía Navarro (eds.), Typological Studies in Language, vol. 120, 3–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.120.01mal.
Mazzitelli, Lidia Federica. 2025. Valency, transitivity and voice in varieties of Kara, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. [Valence, transitivité et voix dans des variétés du kara, une langue océanienne de Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée]. Faits de Langues 54(2). 85–112. https://doi.org/10.1163/19589514-54020007.
Ongenae, Tim A.F. 2026a. Non-prototypical anticausatives in Classical Latin: the relevance of semantic roles in the selection of the three anticausative strategies. Journal of Latin Linguistics 25(1). 89–111. https://doi.org/10.1515/joll-2026-3007.
Ongenae, Tim A.F. 2026b. Anticausativization and lability in Late Latin: The effect of usage frequency on their distribution. Studies in Language 50(3). 623–672. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.25027.ong.
Sobotka, Piotr & Dominika Skrzypek (eds.). 2026. Exploring passivization: cross-linguistic insights and methodological challenges (Trends in Linguistics 404). Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Wiskandt, Niklas. 2026. Stacking of voice suffixes in Turkish and the nature of passivization. In Dominika Skrzypek & Piotr Sobotka (eds.), Exploring Passivization (Trends in Linguistics 404), 113–142. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783112205235-005.
Zúñiga, Fernando, Peter Arkadiev & Veronika Hegedűs. 2024. Applicativizing preverbs in selected European languages. In Fernando Zuniga & Denis Creissels (eds.), Applicative Constructions in the World’s Languages, 419–472. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110730951-014.
Zúñiga, Fernando & Denis Creissels (eds.). 2024. Applicative constructions in the world’s languages (Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics 7). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Zúñiga, Fernando & Seppo Kittilä. 2019. Grammatical voice (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316671399.
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