Introduction This special issue, titled ‘Valency-decreasing derivations and (quasi-)middles in Bantu’ is a follow-up on the workshop ‘Verbal derivation and verb extensions in Bantu’, which was held during the 6th International Conference on Bantu Languages in Helsinki in 2016. In the same year, we presented a paper ‘Middle voice in Bantu’ at the workshop ‘Correlations of valency-changing operations within and across languages’ during the 46th Poznán Linguistics Meeting. It was published in the workshop proceedings as a special issue of Lingua Posnaniensis (Dom et al. 2016). In this article, we argue that the notion of the middle domain as a conceptual space is relevant for the description of a number of verbal derivational morphemes commonly found in Bantu languages. The affixes discussed in Dom et al. (2016) are (reflexes of) the Proto-Bantu reflexive *(j)i-, the neuter *-ɪk, the positional *-am, the associative *-an, and the intransitive separative *-ʊk, the terms for these affixes being adopted from Schadeberg (2003). In the linguistic literature on Bantu languages, the number of descriptive studies dedicated to some of these affixes, such as the neuter, positional or intransitive separative, is rather low compared to other Bantu morphological derivational categories such as the applicative, causative, passive and associative. Each of the articles in this volume focuses on one of these valency-decreasing suffixes insufficiently studied in Bantu scholarship, more specifically on the reflexes of the neuter *-ɪk (contributions by Bernander, Chavula, and Jerro) and the intransitive separative *-ʊk (Guérois and Bostoen). This introductory article is structured as follows. In the second section, we give a general and broad characterisation of the concept ‘middle voice’, and elaborate briefly how we envision it as a useful concept for the analysis of derivational verbal morphology in Bantu. In the third section, we present an overview of the contributions of the special issue through a state-of-the-art discussion of the neuter suffix *-ɪk.

中文翻译：

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班图语气价递减和准中间：一种类型学视角

引言本期名为“班图语的价数递减和（准）中间”的专题，是在班图语第六届国际会议期间举行的“班图语的语言衍生和动词扩展”研讨会的后续活动。 2016年，赫尔辛基。同年，我们在第46届Poznán语言学会议上的“语言内部和不同语言之间的价位转换操作相关性”研讨会上发表了题为“班图中的声音”的论文。它作为Lingua Posnaniensis的特刊在研讨会论文集上发表（Dom等人2016）。在本文中，我们认为中间域作为概念空间的概念与描述班图语中常见的许多言语推导语素有关。在Dom等人中讨论的词缀。（2016）是Proto-Bantu自反*（j）i-，中性*-ɪk，位置* -am，关联* -an和不及物性*-ʊk的反射（这些反射的术语） Schadeberg（2003）采纳的词缀。在有关班图语的语言文献中，专门用于其中一些词缀的描述性研究（例如中性，位置或不及物的分离）的数量与其他班图形态派生类别（例如应用性，因果性，被动性和联想性）相比非常低。 。本卷中的每篇文章都侧重于在班图学者中未充分研究的这些价态降低的后缀之一，更具体地讲是对中性*-ɪk（Bernander，Chavula和Jerro的贡献）和不及物的分离式*-ʊk的反射（Guérois和Bostoen）。该介绍性文章的结构如下。在第二部分中，我们对“中间声音”概念进行了一般性和广泛的表征，并简要阐述了如何将其设想为用于分析班图语衍生语言形态的有用概念。在第三部分中，我们通过对中性后缀*-ɪk的最新讨论，概述了该特刊的贡献。