Defective Paradigms of Reflexive Nouns and Participles in Latvian

Baltic Linguistics, 2020

The article presents a corpus-based investigation of the antipassive reflexive constructions of Latvian. They are subdivided into deobjectives (with suppression of the object) and deaccusatives (with oblique encoding of the object). The emphasis is on the lexical input for the two constructions, frequencies and degrees of lexical entrenchment. The authors identify two subtypes of deobjec-tives: behaviour-characterising deobjectives (lexically entrenched) and activity deobjectives (weakly entrenched but freely produced 'online', hence detectable only through a corpus search). Deaccusatives tend to be lexically entrenched; they are strongly associated with the lexical class of verbs of (chaotic) physical manipulation, but extend beyond this class thanks to processes of metonymy and metaphorisation. The authors argue that while antipassives are often defined as constructions suppressing the object or optionally expressing it as an oblique argument, patientless and patiented antipassives can actually be viewed as different constructions with constructional meanings of their own. While deobjectives conceptualise agency as a self-contained event even though an object is notionally required, deaccusatives additionally convey low affectedness of the object.

Lingvisticae Investigationes, 1986

In many languages of the world reflexive markers have passive meaning in addition to their basic reflexive meaning. This is a puzzling cross-linguistic phenemenon because it occurs not only in genetically related languages, such as German and French, but also in genetically unrelated and structurally sharply distinct languages, such as Uto-Aztecan family of American Indian languages and Slavic languages. Obviously, this cannot be considered an acci dent, but rather is rooted in some fundamental universal property of human languages. In order to explain the cross-linguistic passive use of reflexive markers, we have to search for an invariant of their various uses in languages of the world. The goal of the present paper is to discover this invariant and its functional and formal connections with various uses of reflexive markers. To achieve our goal, we use the conceptual and formal apparatus of Applicative Grammar.

The Unaccusativity Puzzle: Studies on the Syntax-Lexicon Interface. Oxford University Press, 1999

Against the unaccusative analysis. (to appear in A. Alexiadou, E. Anagnostopoulou and M. Everaert (eds) The unaccusativitiy Puzzle: Studies on the syntax-lexicon interface, Oxford University Press). b Max washes. c Max mitraxec. Max washes d Max wast zich. Max washes ZICH

The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics, 2021

Reflexives, encoding a variety of meanings, pose a great challenge for both theoretical and lexicographic description. As they are associated with changes in morphosyntactic properties of verbs, their description is highly relevant for verb valency. In Czech, reflexives function as the reflexive personal pronoun and as verbal affixes. In this paper, we address those language phenomena that are encoded by the reflexive personal pronoun, i.e., reflexivity and reciprocity. We introduce the lexicographic representation of these two language phenomena in the VALLEX lexicon, a valency lexicon of Czech verbs, accounting for the role of the reflexives with respect to the valency structure of verbs. This representation makes use of the division of the lexicon into a data component and a grammar component. It takes into account that reflexivity and reciprocity are conditioned by the semantic properties of verbs on the one hand and that morphosyntactic changes brought about by these phenomena are systemic on the other. About one third of the lexical units contained in the data component of the lexicon are assigned the information on reflexivity and/or reciprocity in the form of pairs of the affected valency complementations (2,039 on reflexivity and 2,744 on reciprocity). A set of rules is formulated in the grammar component (3 rules for reflexivity and 18 rules for reciprocity). These rules derive the valency frames underlying syntactically reflexive and reciprocal constructions from the valency frames describing non-reflexive and non-reciprocal constructions. Finally, the proposed representation makes it possible to determine which lexical units of verbs create ambiguous constructions that can be interpreted either as reflexive or as reciprocal.

Reflexive constructions in the world's languages, ed. by Katarzyna Janic, Nicoletta Puddu, and Martin Haspelmath. Berlin: Language Science Press, 2023

The past four decades have seen a lot of new research on reflexive constructions that goes far beyond the earlier literature, and a variety of technical terms have been used. The divergent frameworks have made some of this literature hard to access. This paper provides a nontechnical overview of the most important kinds of phenomena in the world’s languages and offers a coherent conceptual frame- work and a set of cross-linguistically applicable technical terms, defined also in an appendix. I also explain other widely used terms that do not form part of the present conceptual system (defined in another appendix). The paper begins with a definition of the most basic term (reflexive construction) and then moves to types of reflexivizers (reflexive pronouns and reflexive voice markers), as well as syntac- tic concepts such as ranks and domains. I also briefly discuss obviative anaphoric pronouns and antireflexive marking. Finally, I introduce the distinction between discourse-referential and co-varying coreference. The general philosophy is that we will understand general questions about reflexive constructions (i.e. questions not restricted to the language-particular level) only when we know what is univer- sal and what is historically accidental, so there is also an appendix that lists some possible universals of reflexive constructions.

This paper discusses the various methodological and theoretical prerequisites necessary to cope with a seemingly quite simple task. This task consists in establishing the number and types of verb pairs in Lithuanian and Polish which are morphologically related by the presence vs. absence of the reflexive marker and which, from a semantic point of view, relate to each other like converses (= RM-converses). We are faced with the question of whether RM-converses can really be considered a class in a taxonomy of RM-derivatives, sufficiently distinct, primarily, from anticausatives. After delimiting (RM-)converses from symmetrical and reciprocal predicates as well as from the grammatical passive, it turns out that any sensible proposal for a differentiation between RM-converses and anticausatives hinges on the status of the obliquely marked constituent: if it is treated as an argument of the RM-derivative, it has to be counted as a converse to the non-RM-verb since numerical valence is retained; if the oblique constituent counts as an adjunct, the RM-derivatives should be considered an anticausative. The question thus boils down to "taking cuts" on an argument -adjunct cline. Since no existing theoretical account of the morphology-semantics interface provides clear-cut criteria for making decisions that can be generalized, criteria are detailed on a language-specific basis and applied to Lithuanian and Polish two-place RM-converses, for which lexical groups are established. Contrasts between both languages are highlighted on the basis of an in-depth analysis. With all methodological caveats in mind, one of the results of an investigation thus conducted consists in a commented list of RM-converses which, for Lithuanian, comprises three times as many items as were established in earlier investigations of RM-verbs. Apart from this, and the methodological pitfalls brought to light, the article discusses various specific effects relevant for a lexical typology of minor classes of RM-verbs.

English Language and Linguistics, 2014

Present-Day English is generally assumed to possess only a handful of lexicalized reflexive verbs (absent oneself from, pride oneself on, etc.) and to use reflexive pronouns neither for the marking of motion middles nor the derivation of anticausative (decausative) verbs. Such middle uses of reflexive markers (non-argument reflexives) are widespread in other European languages. Based on corpus evidence, Geniušienė (1987), Peitsara (1997) and Siemund (2010) demonstrate that English reflexive pronouns do occur in these functions and offer extensive lists of the verbs involved. I here follow up the historical development of these verbs from Middle English to Present-Day English. My analysis is based on a survey of the relevant verb entries in the Oxford English Dictionary (222 verbs), complemented by an examination of the OED quotation base. My study shows that the number of reflexive verbs in English has gradually, but steadily, increased since the emergence of complex reflexives (myself, yourself, etc.) in Middle English. They often result from lexicalization processes, but the data also show more regular patterns indicative of grammatical processes. The Oxford English Dictionary proves to be a rich and highly valuable data source for carrying out serious grammatical analyses.

univie.ac.at