Typology of voice marker stacking

Voice marking in general is a fairly well explored topic – both from a typological perspective and in individual languages. Voice marker stacking, i.e., the co-occurrence of two or more voice markers on the same predicate, has received very little attention so far. Systematic studies are available for a few, mainly Turkic and Bantu, languages. But voice marker stacking has been observed in numerous other languages (and is probably present, but still undescribed in many more), typological studies are not available as of now.

The goal of the project is to compile a comprehensive typology of voice marker stacking. The studies within the project will address different typological perspectives, but will also provide case studies of voice marker stacking in selected languages of different families.

The project is currently starting and still in development. Detailed research questions and hypotheses for the studies, examples, and a working definition of voice marker stacking will be provided here soon.

The following people are (or have been) involved in the project:

• Niklas Wiskandt (That’s me! Postdoc 2025-, HHU Düsseldorf, Department of Linguistics)
• N.N. (Graduate student/research intern) – Are you interested in writing your thesis on voice marking, or do you want to work in the project for your “Professional Experience 1 – Research” M.A. module at HHU? Drop me an e-mail!
• N.N. (Cooperation partner) – Are you also working on voice marker stacking, or have relevant data, and would like to collaborate? I’d be happy to hear from you!

The courses were taught at HHU Düsseldorf. Students came mainly from the B.A. and M.A. programs in General Linguistics.

• M.A. seminar: Typology of argument morphosyntax (Winter term 2024-25)
• M.A. seminar: Morphosyntactic typology of voice (Winter term 2023-24)

• Wiskandt, Niklas. 2026. Stacking of voice suffixes in Turkish and the nature of passivization. In Piotr Sobotka & Dominika Skrzypek (eds.). Exploring Passivization: Cross-Linguistic Insights and Methodological Challenges. (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 404). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 113-142.

• Wiskandt, Niklas. in preparation. Towards a typology of voice marker stacking.

• Wiskandt, Niklas. 2026. Morphological typology of voice marker stacking — Talk at “Transalpine Typology Meeting”, Munich, Germany
• Wiskandt, Niklas. 2026. Syncretic and divergent encoding in voice marker stacking — Talk at “(In)transitivity and its Variation: A Workshop on Morphosyntactic and Semantic Interfaces”, Poznań, Poland
• Wiskandt, Niklas. 2026. Compatibility of valency operations in the typology of voice marker stacking — Talk at “59th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea”, Osnabrück, Germany
• Kihara, Claudius Patrick, Niklas Wiskandt & Jens Fleischhauer. 2026. Neuter and applicative in Gĩkũyũ — Talk at “11th International Conference on Bantu Languages”, Ghent, Belgium
• Wiskandt, Niklas. 2026. A typology of voice marker stacking — Talk at “16th International Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology”, Lyon, France
• Wiskandt, Niklas. 2025. Towards a typology of syntactic variation in voice stacking — Talk at „Syntax of the World’s Languages X“, Potsdam, Germany
• Wiskandt, Niklas. 2025. Development and validation of a targeted elicitation method for combinations of voice markers — Talk at „58th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea“, Bordeaux, France
• Wiskandt, Niklas. 2024. Exploring the combinatorics of voice markers – A case study on passivization in Turkish — Talk at „57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea“, Workshop 13 „Passive and passivization across languages in dynamic and typological perspectives“, Helsinki, Finland