Interdisciplinary Colloquium
Dr. Martha McGinnis, University of Victoria
As part of the department’s weekly research colloquium,
held every Thursday from 16:15 to 17:45 in the Webb Building (Room 103),
the following lecture by Dr. Martha McGinnis (University of Victoria) will take place:
Syntactic Variation in Morphological Reflexives as Split Intransitivity
Abstract:
Cross-linguistically, morphological reflexives (Romance se/si, Hebrew hitpa’el) often share characteristics with pronouns or Voice morphology, and have been analyzed in both ways. Voice-based analyses also differ as to whether the subject originates as an internal or external argument. In this talk, I argue that these reflexives are Voice heads, not pronouns. They come in two varieties: unergative and reflexive Voice. Natural reflexives (shave, wash) condition an alloseme of unergative Voice expressing a self-directed event. Reflexive Voice is syntactically unaccusative but introduces an implicit external argument, whose reference is assigned via syntactic agreement. The agreeing DP is interpreted as the external argument, and its base position as either a SELF or a SE anaphor, depending on whether or not it is an argument of the reflexive predicate.
The proposed analysis predicts that morphological reflexives are restricted to verbs allowing an external argument. Class III (piacere) psych-verbs are a prima facie counterexample, as they appear to be bivalent unaccusatives, yet are compatible with reflexive Voice. I argue that, while Class III verbs indeed can be structured as bivalent unaccusatives (as in Hebrew hitqaša ‘find X/*Xself difficult’), in some languages they can also be structured as transitives, with the experiencer merged as an external argument. This transitive syntax may be obscured by quirky case-marking, as in Italian (A Maria sono piacuti gli enigmi ‘Maria liked the puzzles’). Georgian provides compelling evidence that both transitive and unaccusative structures can be associated with a given psych-root.
All are welcome!
