Labile verbs in Late Latin

The paper discusses the phenomenon of Late Latin intransitivizations, where a morphologically active form of a transitive verb is used with a middle-passive function. Intransitivizations are present throughout the history of the language, but their number increases significantly in the 3rd-4th century CE. They are instances of patient-preserving lability and represent one of the possible means to express the anticausative alternation. The analysis casts intransitivizations into the broader context of voice fluctuations in Late Latin, by comparing them with competing constructions and by examining the possible causes for their increase in frequency during the Late Latin stage. © 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston.