Middle Voice and reflexive interpretations: afto-prefixation in Greek

Abstract

This paper investigates in detail the properties of a particular morphological reflexivization strategy in Greek, named afto-prefixation. The basic building blocks of afto-prefixation are the prefix afto-, shown to be an anti-assistive intensifier, and Middle Voice, a non-active syntactic Voice that gives rise to an existential interpretation of the implicit external argument, like the canonical Passive, but exhibits no Disjoint Reference Effects, unlike the Passive. The reflexive interpretation of afto-prefixation is the result of semantically composing these two elements. We argue that neither the prefix nor non-active morphology is a reflexivizer, i.e. neither imposes identity between two arguments of the predicate. The results of our analysis are rather surprising to the extent that they show that there exist reflexivization strategies that involve no reflexivization at all. We show that Voice and the class of intensifiers are integral elements of certain reflexivization strategies and demonstrate how and why they interact compositionally in deriving reflexive interpretations. This interaction points towards an account of both anaphoric and morphological reflexivization strategies that depends crucially on properties of predicates (rather than anaphors), and is crucially based on a dissociation of intensification from reflexivization.