Reflexive Marking Research Articles

The rise of the affixal reflexive in Baltic and its consequences

The article deals with the consequences of the affixalisation of the formerly enclitic reflexive pronoun in the Baltic languages. This affixalisation caused a reorganisation in the system of reflexive marking, as the new affixal forms became restricted to middle-voice meanings. The Old Lithuanian and Old Latvian texts reflect a transitional stage in this process. Oscillations in the choice of a verbal form to which an affixalising reflexive pronoun could accrete led to the rise of interesting morphosyntactic patterns with double or varying placement of the affixal marker. The disappearance of the reflexive marker from the syntax furthermore caused syntactic changes leading to the rise of new grammatical constructions. This is discussed in the article for permissive constructions as well as for raising constructions with verbs of saying and propositional attitude. The emphasis on the affixalisation process and on the semantic, morphosyntactic and syntactic processes it set in motion provides a common thread linking a number of seemingly unconnected changes. Though occurring in the prehistory of the Baltic languages, the affixalisation led to a chain of diachronic processes extending to the early 21th century. 

Reflexive permissives and the middle voice

The article deals with the ‘permissive middle’, a permissive construction characterized by the coincidence of the permittor and the embedded clause patient (as in They allowed themselves to be cheated) and belonging to the middle voice in the sense that its formal markers, though originating as reflexive pronouns, have lost their original reflexive function. Such permissive middles can be clearly set apart from permissive reflexives in those languages which have a formal differentiation of reflexive pronouns proper and originally reflexive markers that have shifted to middle or mediopassive function. The data of the Baltic languages are used in the article to illustrate the formal properties of permissive middles (a characteristic feature is the oscillation between reflexive marking on the matrix verb and on the embedded verb) and the tendencies in their development. Permissive middles are also shown to be attested outside Baltic, e.g. in East Slavonic. The second part of the article is devoted to a discussion of the place of the permissive middle on the semantic map of the middle voice, and in particular to its relationship to the ‘curative’ middle (the ‘causative-reflexive’).

Richard Waltereit, Reflexive Marking in the History of French (Studies in language companion series, 127), Amsterdam, Benjamins, 2012, X + 225 p.

Richard Waltereit, <i>Reflexive Marking in the History of French</i> (Studies in language companion series, 127), Amsterdam, Benjamins, 2012, X + 225 p.

Reflexive Marking in the History of French by Richard Waltereit

stigmate dans des textes administratifs et de presses consacrés à la Zone d’Expansion Nord de Palerme (Sicile) est analysée avec finesse par Ferdinando Fava. Béatrice Turpin illustre l’usage des stéréotypes d’un espace urbain stigmatisé (“quartier”, “zone”, “banlieue”, “cité”, “tours”, “barres”) dans le vocabulaire des quotidiens français, alors qu’elle note la déconstruction de tels stéréotypes dans Bondy Blog, un forum Internet traitant des faits locaux à Bondy, un quartier populaire au nord-est de Paris. Julien Longhi procède à un comptage lexical dans les différents usages de l’expression formulaire “jeune de banlieue” dont il argumente à la fois la richesse contextuelle et le “caractère figé, discursif, de référent social et polémique” (131). Les deux derniers chapitres élargissent le champ d’analyse vers la politique et les études postcoloniales. Bernard Lamizet place le concept de la banlieue dans sa continuité historique et encourage de le revoir aussi sous les angles des médiations spatiales, institutionnelles, et culturelles. En tout dernier lieu, Franck Jablonka aborde la sémiotisation de l’espace à travers le discours postcolonial, plus particulièrement le concept de l’espace-langue chez l’écrivain tunisien Abdellwahab Meddeb. Cet ouvrage aussi atypique qu’ambitieux est recommandé à un public de spécialistes motivés dans les sciences sociales interdisciplinaires. University of lllinois, Urbana-Champaign Zsuzsanna Fagyal-Le Mentec Waltereit, Richard. Reflexive Marking in the History of French. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012. ISBN 978-90-272-0594-0. Pp. 225. $149. The title may seem a bit misleading in that Waltereit explores only the non-clitic reflexives soi and soi-même. The reader will find, however, a fascinating, corpus-based study illustrating how soi and soi-même have gradually been replaced by the personal pronouns lui/elle or lui/elle-même from Old French, where soi was widely used for coreference for any singular subject (Devant soi voit ses enemis) to present day, where soi is relatively restricted to non-specific pronouns and noun phrases (Chacun pense à soi) and idiomatic expressions (soi-disant, aller de soi).At the core of the monograph, Waltereit presents a detailed analysis of soi versus lui to express same-subject coreference in nine predicates from the twelfth to the twentieth century. Distinguishing specific from non-specific subjects, he shows how the various predicates indeed change at different rates with respect to soi/lui.Although an adherent to Construction Grammar, Waltereit includes a rather intense discussion of Binding theory,grammar and discourse anaphora, specificity in coreference, and the role of argument/predicate focus and intensification in the choice of simple versus reinforced forms (those with même). Summaries of Warnecke (1908) and Brandt (1944), who previously studied the soi/lui alternation, highlight the theoretical debates, along with excerpts of grammarians who have discussed soi/lui throughout the history of French from Vaugelas to Grevisse. In 186 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 Reviews 187 the conclusion, Waltereit explains why the change from soi to lui occurred, arguing for a case of secondary grammaticalization (generalization of an already grammatical item), which he aptly relates to the evolution of predicate negation in French. In both cases, the unmarked form (soi, ne) was replaced by a marked form (lui, ne...pas), which over time became the unmarked form. Waltereit, however, views the change from soi to lui as involving more than just linguistic extravagance. Pragmatic factors, such as greater speaker involvement and an increase in subjectivity, as well as“strategies aimed at producing a noteworthy and expressive utterance”(204) are what ultimately caused the change, which was further reinforced by the fact that non-reflexive lui/elle or lui/elle-même could also be used for discourse anaphora. Although the book is clearly aimed at theoretical and historical linguists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students will benefit from the superbly glossed examples, especially the Old French ones, which include an accurate word-by-word gloss with the overall translation. Students, however, would probably find Waltereit’s emphasis on theory rather tedious course reading. Furthermore, the book is full of typographical errors: some annoying (“no uns” for “nouns,” 131), others throwing the reader off track (“I...

In defense of the reflexivization analysis of anticausativization

Horvath and Siloni (2011) argue against an analysis of anticausativization as reflexivization as presented especially by Koontz-Garboden (2009) for languages in which anticausatives exhibit overt reflexive marking. We show that Horvath and Siloni's evidence, when examined in greater detail, either does not argue against such an analysis, or in some cases even supports it.

Restrictions on reflexive and anti-causative readings in nominalizations and participles

&lt;p&gt;This article discusses the absence of reflexive or self-caused readings in certain types of participles and de-verbal nominalizations, like &lt;em&gt;the hanging of the suicidal patient&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The suicidal patient was hanged yesterday&lt;/em&gt;. I argue that the &amp;ldquo;anti-reflexive&amp;rdquo; reading is not triggered by the presence of a subject PRO or &lt;em&gt;pro&lt;/em&gt;, but rather by the absence of reflexive marking, i.e. overt marking that functions to recode lexically specified co-reference relations between the arguments of a predicate. I argue that the verb-phrase needs to be decomposed into at least two subparts/subevents and that each sub-event carries information about the participants involved in it (as in e.g. Pustejovsky 1995 and Ramchand 2008b). More specifically, arguments receive their thematic information from indices on verbal heads that introduces sub-events. Event-denoting nominalizations and participles in general inherit the event structure from the verb, i.e. the indices present in the verbal roots. I further argue that simple reflexives can be verbal heads, that are inserted as a last resort when there is a mismatch between the lexically stored information of a verb and the structure generated in the syntax. This article focuses on data from Swedish, but comparisons will be made with English.&lt;/p&gt;

Tourism and ageing: A transformative research agenda

This paper provides a reflexive marking of tourism and ageing research, arguing for a transformation of its research approaches. It observes that extant research on tourism in later life is largely quantitative and concerned with developing market-oriented typologies. Here we argue the case for humanist, participatory approaches to the study of older people that adopt the principles of critical gerontology and hopeful tourism. We discuss biographical research to illustrate how such enquiry could engage older people, foreground their voices and agendas and impact on their lives. We conclude with a four part agenda for tourism and ageing research.

A frequentist explanation of some universals of reflexive marking

A frequentist explanation of some universals of reflexive marking

A frequentist explanation of some universals of reflexive marking

This paper identifies a number of empirically observable universals of reflexive marking that concern the existence of a special reflexive pronoun and the length of the marker that is used in reflexive constructions, in various different positions of the nonreflexive or reflexive pronoun. Most of the proposed universals have been mentioned earlier in the literature, but they have not been very prominent because the literature on binding has focused on language-specific generalizations rather than identifying readily testable cross-linguistic generalizations. I argue that all of these universals have their basis in a frequency asymmetry: Under different circumstances, the likelihood of an anaphoric pronoun being coreferential with the subject can be quite different, and this is argued to be the motivation for the universal patterns of form.

Light and heavy reflexive marking

In Romanian, the middle marker se is employed to encode five distinct situation types: reflexive, reciprocal, (medio-)passive, inchoative and impersonal. This work identifies the relationships among the different uses of the marker and puts forward explanations for them within a cognitive, functional framework. Following studies such as those by Faltz (1985), Haiman (1983), Haspelmath (2005), Kemmer (1993ab), Lakoff (1977), Manoliu-Manea (1994, 2000), Maldonado (1992, 1999), Manney (2000), and Yoshimura and Taylor (2004), the current paper gives a synchronic account of the Romanian Middle Domain, its organization and the relationships between the various middle constructions found inside it. Findings suggest that the semantic property of low elaboration of events (introduced by Kemmer, 1993ab) constitutes the common denominator among the different uses explored. This work provides an insight into Romanian itself, as well as a contribution to cognitive theories of human language and responds to the call for more data and further investigations of middles cross-linguistically (see Smith, 2004).

Same source, same target, different paths: from ‘person’ to reflexive in Umpithamu and other Paman languages

This study analyses a case of parallel grammaticalization in five genetically related languages, with a lexical source meaning ‘person’ developing to a grammatical function of reflexive marking. Although not typologically unusual, this case is special because, in spite of the overall parallelism, the resulting reflexive markers are located in different parts of the system, either as free or clitic elements associated with a lexical object position, or as bound elements within the morphology of the pronouns. It is shown that this morphosyntactic divergence can be attributed to differences in the organization of the wider grammatical system, more specifically the availability of a number of constructions with pronouns. More generally, this is used as a case study to argue that cross-linguistic studies of grammaticalization should take into account the wider grammatical system in which developments take place, and focus on the morphosyntactic details of the path leading to the grammatical target, in addition to semantic and pragmatic relations between source and target. It is shown that even in the absence of genuine diachronic material, detailed comparison of grammatical systems can uncover systemic factors that motivate morphosyntactic divergence.

Optimality, bidirectionality &amp; the evolution of binding phenomena

This paper argues for a frequentist/functionalist account of certain universal patterns of binding phenomena and strategies of reflexive marking. I will claim that the supposed effects of Principles A & B (Chomsky, Linguistic Inquiry 11, 1–46 1980; Reinhart and Reuland, Linguistic Inquiry 24,657–720 1993; et al.) can be treated as epiphenomena which emerge as a result of the complicit pressure of basic economy considerations and statistical asymmetries in language use. The account is spelled out explicitly in a stochastic version of bidirectional Optimality Theory and a novel type of constraint is proposed that enables a grammar to reflect statistical states of affairs in learning data. This approach in turn lends itself to an evolutionary story involving iterated, bidirectional learning.

Topics in Bulgarian morphology and syntax: a minimalist perspective

This paper offers a minimalist view of a variety of topics that in Bulgarian are at the crossroads of lexicon, syntax, morphology, and phonology. It discusses syntactic characteristics in periphrastic tenses with biclausal structures and the formal properties of Balkan control/raising constructions. It sketches accounts for clitic templates, person restrictions, and reflexive haplology that combine syntax and morphology, and assign an important role to person in postsyntactic morphology. It reviews some minimalist-oriented displacement analyses of the distribution of interrogative li . It examines the construction with an obligatory clitic Trese me “I am shivering,” proposing that lexical structure and syntactic conditions on clitic pronouns and doubling account for its characteristics. It compares two prominent GB/minimalist views on reflexive marking and applies them to inherent reflexive verbs. It ends by discussing word order in auxiliary complexes, and touches on left branch phenomena, and on the relation between displacement and information structure.

Learning from creoles

The study of reflexive marking in creoles is a wide topic and has received a remarkable input of scholarly work. When reviewing all this work, and the many findings that have been presented in it, one may wonder what justification there may be to add yet another treatment to the many other ones that are available. The main reason for doing so is to propose a perspective that differs somewhat from that of previous authors, one that applies grammaticalization theory to this subject matter. To this end, a number of parameters and distinctions are proposed that appear to be relevant for understanding why reflexive forms are structured the way they are.

Light and heavy reflexives

Haiman (1983) has argued that the phonological weight of reflexives within many languages is determined by the type of verb that they are coupled with. Specifically, he has claimed that reflexives which occur with introverted verbs denoting actions which one generally performs upon one's self tend to be phonologically lighter than reflexives which occur with extroverted verbs denoting actions which the subject usually performs towards others. Contra Haiman, Kemmer (1993) has argued that light and heavy reflexive marking is determined by the degree to which the participants in the action denoted by a sentence are distinguishable. The current article defends Haiman against Kemmer's critique but also advances many other criticisms of Haiman's analysis. Thus, it is argued contra Haiman that introversion and extroversion can be properties not only of the actions denoted by verbs but of the actions denoted by sentences also. Furthermore, it is shown contra Haiman that notions of introversion and extroversion can differ across languages. Finally, it is demonstrated that although the distinction between introversion and extroversion can account for more instances of the contrast between light and heavy reflexive marking than envisioned by Haiman, it still fails to explain every such instance. Problems with other theories which draw upon the distinction between introversion and extroversion to motivate the contrast between light and heavy reflexive marking such as Reinhart and Reuland (1993) are also highlighted. Finally, it is shown that theories of reflexivization which do not appeal to the distinction between introversion and extroversion such as Chomsky (1986) or Pollard and Sag (1992) are unable to predict observed patterns of light and heavy reflexive marking. It is concluded that no satisfactory account of the contrast between light and heavy reflexive marking currently exists and that further data pertaining to issues such as diachronic evolution and cross-l

On reflexive forms in creoles

The study of reflexive marking in creoles is a wide topic and has received a remarkable input of scholarly work. When reviewing all this work, and the many findings that have been presented in it, one may wonder what justification there may be to add yet another treatment to the many other ones that are available. The main reason for doing so is to propose a perspective that differs somewhat from that of previous authors, one that applies grammaticalization theory to this subject matter. To this end, a number of parameters and distinctions are proposed that appear to be relevant for understanding why reflexive forms are structured the way they are.

From Reflexive to Passive

Previous approaches to the passive development from a reflexive marking focus on how the former is similar to the latter semantically and syntactically. I show that the passive evolution is better understood by looking at the internal procedures that the reflexive undergoes on the way to the passive. This approach clearly recognizes that reflexive clauses with agent subjects are highly resistant to the passive interpretation, for example. A reflexive marking tends to acquire a canonical passive function when it loses the true reflexive use, and morphologically, when it becomes an affix.

Binding theory and grammatical specific language impairment in children

This study investigates the intrasentential assignment of reference to pronouns ( him, her) and anaphors ( himself, herself) as characterized by Binding Theory in a subgroup of “Grammatical specifically language-impaired” (SLI) children. The study aims to (1) provide further insight into the underlying nature of Grammatical SLI in children and (2) elucidate the relationship between different sources of knowledge, that is, syntactic knowledge versus knowledge of lexical properties and pragmatic inference in the assignment of intrasentential coreference. In two experiments, using a picture–sentence pair judgement task, the children's knowledge of the lexical properties versus syntactic knowledge (Binding Principles A and B) in the assignment of reflexives and pronouns was investigated. The responses of 12 Grammatical SLI children (aged 9:3 to 12:10) and three language ability (LA) control groups of 12 children (aged 5:9 to 9:1) were compared. The results indicated that the SLI children and the LA controls may use a combination of conceptual–lexical and pragmatic knowledge (e.g., semantic gender, reflexive marking of the predicate, and assignment of theta roles) to help assign reference to anaphors and pronouns. The LA controls also showed appropriate use of the syntactic knowledge. In contrast, the SLI children performed at chance when syntactic information was crucially required to rule out inappropriate coreference. The data are consistent with an impairment with the (innate) syntactic knowledge characterized by Binding Theory which underlies reference assignment to anaphors and pronouns. We conclude that the SLI children's syntactic representation is underspecified with respect to coindexation between constituents and the syntactic properties of pronouns. Support is provided for the proposal that Grammatical SLI children have a modular language deficit with syntactic dependent structural relationships between constituents, that is, a Representational Deficit with Dependent Relationships (RDDR). Further consideration of the linguistic characteristics of this deficit is made in relation to the hypothesized syntactic representations of young normally developing children. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.