Abstract
Old Church Slavonic data manifest significant similarities in the distribution and formal properties of anticausatives, reflexives, subject experiencer verbs, statives, and reciprocals, while their semantics may also be viewed as partly uniform. The structures representing the said classes of verbs are very frequent in the language, while passive structures, formed with analytic morpho-syntactic constructions, are relatively infrequent. Consequently, the expressions headed by anticausatives, reflexives, subject experiencer verbs, statives, and reciprocals (as well as dative impersonal structures) encroach on the area of semantics belonging in Modern Slavic to be the realm expressed in terms of passive morpho-syntax. The conclusion that can be drawn from this state of affairs is that Old Church Slavonic is characterized by the opposition of active and middle voices, while the passive voice is in its infancy.
Highlights
Old Church Slavonic data manifest significant similarities in the distribution and formal properties of anticausatives, reflexives, subject experiencer verbs, statives, and reciprocals, while their semantics may be viewed as partly uniform
This is frequently treated as a mark of the unergative structure of verbs, but we propose that reflexives are basically like unaccusatives8, the only difference being that their roots require the animacy and agentivity of their internal arguments
Two reciprocal forms are found in our data,9 which we consider to be structurally identical with the reflexive, the difference resulting from the semantics of the stem, enforcing reciprocality on the interpretation of the obligatorily collective argument
Summary
The massive appearance of the reflexively marked forms in Old Church Slavonic ( OCS) is tied in with the restructuring of the inflectional pattern, which underwent significant changes with respect to Proto-Indo-European ( PIE). Lunt (2001: 158), on the other hand, states that the sę structures in Old Church Slavonic express passive voice (competing with periphrastic constructions with the verb byti ‘be’) Another approach depicts sę verbs as designating intransitives in general (Krause and Slocum 2013).. The situation which we come across in OCS is better reflected by the understanding of the middle voice which is proposed in Alexiadou and Doron (2012), who link the term: middle voice with the appearance of characteristic morphology and a cluster of semantic functions These functions are the reflexive function, reciprocal function, anticausative function, dispositional middle, medio-passive and passive. Matthew from the Codex Marianus in the Corpus CyrilloMethodianum Helsingiense has been selected as the data base
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