On the distribution of reflexive and reciprocal markers in Italian, Serbian and English

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Ms Maja Miličević. RCEAL PhD Student.
• Tuesday 30 October 2007, 16:00-17:30
• GR-06/07, English Faculty Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Napoleon Katsos.

Many of the world’s languages employ two different reflexive and reciprocal markers, one of which is phonologically lighter than the other. The distribution of ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ markers is closely related to the predicate the marker is associated with. In languages such as English, Dutch or Russian it is grammaticalised and the light marking can only be used with a limited set of verbs (cf. Bob washed (himself) vs. Bob hates *(himself)). On the other hand, in languages like Italian, Serbian and German there is a preference for the light marker with some verbs, and the heavy marker with others (Serbian: Marko se obukao ‘Marko dressed’ vs. Marko voli sebe ‘Marko loves himself’). This paper investigates the distribution of light and heavy reflexive and reciprocal markers in Italian, Serbian and English, following the account put forward by Haspelmath (2005).

Contrary to the accounts based on predicate meaning (Haiman 1983, König and Vezzosi 2004), Haspelmath (2005) claims that the distribution of reflexive markers is directly dependent on the verbs’ frequency of reflexive use: if a verb is often used with reflexive objects, it tends to appear with light reflexive marking, and if it is more commonly used with disjoint pronominal objects, it normally carries a heavy reflexive marker. Applying the same logic to reciprocals, it can be assumed that verbs often used in reciprocal form tend to occur with light reciprocal markers, while those whose reciprocal use is rare take heavy markers.

For all three languages, we discuss a corpus study and the judgements of a group of native speakers on light and heavy reflexive and reciprocal markers used with 22 verbs that differ in frequency of reflexive and reciprocal use. It is shown that the empirical data largely lends support to Haspelmath’s proposal, but several additional factors need to be taken into consideration in order to achieve a full explanation of reflexive and reciprocal marker distribution.

References

Haiman, J. (1983). Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59. 781–819.

Haspelmath, M. (2005). A frequentist explanation of some universals of reflexive marking. Draft of a paper presented at the Workshop on Reciprocals and Reflexives, Freie Universität Berlin, 1-2 October 2004. Downloaded from http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/papers.html, on 20 January 2006.

König, E. and Vezzosi, L. (2004). The role of predicate meaning in the development of reflexivity. In Bisang, W., Himmelmann, N. P. and Wiemer, B. (eds), What makes Grammaticalization? Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 213–244.

This talk is part of the RCEAL Tuesday Colloquia series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• GR-06/07, English Faculty Building
• RCEAL Tuesday Colloquia

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.