In recent years there has been an interest in the phenomenon of "Similar Place Avoidance" (SPA), particularly as concerns Arabic CCC radicals. Although little evidence has been considered outside Arabic, Hebrew, and perhaps Semitic in general, where roots with successive consonants sharing the same place of articulation are underrepresented, similarity avoidance has sometimes been hypothesized as a universal tendency. Progressively extending our scope from the Atlantic subgroup of Niger-Congo in its relation with other Niger-Congo languages, which had been our original, diachronic concern, to almost all of Africa and beyond, we undertook an extensive crosslinguistic investigation of SPA and found impressive support for this notion.

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The antipassive, an object-demoting diathesis commonly associated with ergative languages, has so far largely gone unnoticed in Bantu languages, which are of the accusative type. In this article, comparative evidence is raised to demonstrate that the antipassive is a voice construction to be reckoned with in Bantu. A robust typology of Bantu voice constructions is developed on the basis of the scarce data available in the literature. This evidence is reinterpreted in the light of original data from a number of Bantu languages, such as Cilubà and Kirundi, which were the subject of a more in-depth analysis. It is shown how the antipassive generally developed as a specific reading of the highly polysemous verbal suffix -an-, which is more commonly used as a reciprocal/ associative marker. These and other functions can be accounted for by the underlying notion of "plurality of relations", which is characterized by a low degree of participant/event elaboration. From a syntactic point of view, it is argued that the development of antipassives out of plurality constructions results from the gradual demotion of the second participant of a co-participative event.