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At first it’s unfamiliar then it strikes root : reflexives that do not behave themselves| old_uid | 10282 |
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| title | At first it’s unfamiliar then it strikes root : reflexives that do not behave themselves |
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| start_date | 2011/10/17 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Bât. D, salle D 328 |
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| summary | In this talk I will discuss so-called “inherent” reflexive verbs (e.g. behave/devote oneself in English, se suicider in French, sich schämen in German, vergognarsi in Italian), in which the reflexive element does not correspond to a semantic argument (cf. *I behaved John). I argue that inherent reflexives are the counterparts of so-called “deponent” verbs familiar from traditional grammars of Latin, in the sense that the reflexive element in them is the counterpart of the ‘deponent’ (i.e. passive as opposed to active) inflection in Latin and other languages with two distinct conjugational voice paradigms. In turn, the correlations between inherent reflexives and deponents throw new light on the directionality of transitivity alternations and on the issue whether and what kind of meaning ‘roots’ encode. Crucially, I contend that: (i) inherent reflexives (and their deponent counterparts) are ‘root’ formations, specifically from nominal and/or adjectival roots, i.e. conforming to the schema [x [x √NOUN/ADJ]]; (ii) inherent reflexives (and deponents in languages that have them) lack an external argument in the syntax. Building on the idea that overt morphological voice markings reflect a subset of the feature distinctions associated with v0 in the syntax, aka ‘flavors-of-v’ accounts (Folli & Harley 2005), the central claim that I put forward is that ‘deponent’ morphology, be it non- active/passive or reflexive (depending on the language), relates to an actor-initiation feature (Kallulli 2007) of v0 in syntactic configurations lacking an external argument (Embick 1997, 2000, 2004).
References cited: Embick, David. 1997. Voice and the interfaces of syntax. Doctoral Dissertation.
University of Pennsylvania. Embick, David. 2000. Features, syntax, and categories in the Latin Perfect. Linguistic
Inquiry 31:185-230. Embick, David. 2004. Unaccusative syntax and verbal alternations. In A. Alexiadou et al.
(eds.) The Unaccusativity Puzzle 137-158. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Folli, Raffaella & Heidi Harley. 2005. Flavours of v: consuming results in Italian and English. In P. Kempchinsky & R. Slabakova (eds.) Aspectual Enquiries 95-120. Dordrecht: Springer.
Kallulli, Dalina. 2007. Rethinking the passive/anticausative distinction. Linguistic Inquiry 38:770-780. |
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| responsibles | Soare, Ferret |
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