Talk: Are all reflexives valency-reducing? Insights from verbal reflexives

Reflexives are usually marked in one of two ways: through independent pronouns (e.g. myself/yourself/himself in English) or through verbal morphology (e.g. í:- in Creek (Martin 2011)). While much typological research has focused on independent reflexives or on reflexive systems as a whole (e.g. Geniusiene 1987), verbal reflexives remain understudied. This presentation reports on an exploratory cross-linguistic study of the morphological, semantic, and syntactic properties of verbal reflexives. Drawing on descriptive grammars and other written sources, I analyze data from 17 languages. I focus on the question what verbal reflexives can reveal about the theoretical modeling of reflexives - especially regarding the widespread assumption that reflexives reduce a verb’s number of arguments (Faltz 1977, Dik 1983, Heaton 2018).

Based on patterns of positional distribution, semantic functions, and interactions with ergative alignment, I show that verbal reflexives exhibit considerable variation. While some support a valency-reducing analysis, others are more neutral, and one even presents clear counter-evidence. These findings challenge the idea that reflexives uniformly function as valency-reducing devices, highlighting the need for a more nuanced account.

This presentation is based on research conducted for my bachelor’s thesis and aims to contribute to a deeper typological understanding of reflexive systems.

References:
Dik, Simon C. 1983. On the status of verbal reflexives. In Liliane Tasmowski & Dominique Willems (eds.), Problems in syntax, 231–255. New York, NY: Springer.
Faltz, Leonard M. 1977. Reflexivization: A study in universal syntax. Berkley, CA: University of California dissertation.
Geniusiene, Emma. 1987. The typology of reflexives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Heaton, Raina. 2018. Intransitivizing morphology. Language and Linguistics Compass 12(12). 1–25.
Martin, Jack B. 2011. A grammar of Creek (Muskogee). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Info

Day: 2025-05-17
Start time: 15:20
Duration: 00:30
Room: GWZ 2.316
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics
Language: en

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