37.3423, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027 - The Fringes of Voice: Rare, Non-Prototypical, and Understudied Phenomena in Voice Marking (Slovakia)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3423. Tue 20 Oct 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 37.3423, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027 - The Fringes of Voice: Rare, Non-Prototypical, and Understudied Phenomena in Voice Marking (Slovakia)
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Date: 16-Oct-2026
From: Tim Ongenae [tim.ongenae at ugent.be]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2027 - The Fringes of Voice: Rare, Non-Prototypical, and Understudied Phenomena in Voice Marking
Workshop at SLE 2027 - The Fringes of Voice: Rare, Non-Prototypical,
and Understudied Phenomena in Voice Marking
Short Title: SLE2027
Date: 25-Aug-2027 - 28-Aug-2027
Location: Košice, Slovakia
Contact: Tim Ongenae
Contact Email: tim.ongenae at ugent.be
Meeting URL:
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2027/workshop-proposals-call-for-abstracts/
Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Syntax; Typology
Submission Deadline: 10-Nov-2026
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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