A prototype analysis of Spanish indeterminate reflexive constructions

Turley, Jeffrey S.

doi:10.1016/s0388-0001(97)00027-2

Cited by 44 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These two configurations have been sometimes treated as prototypes. According to Turley (1998), for instance, the aforementioned features are clustered together in the prototypical instances of the Spanish reflexive passive, as in example (8), where the construction has deontic overtones (but habitual nuances are also possible), the state of affairs is irrealis, the agent is generic, etc. Although it is basically adequate and corroborated by a great amount of cross-linguistic data, this generalization is seriously challenged by the facts of Old Italian.…”

Section: The Reflexive Passive: Domains Of Usementioning

confidence: 99%

“…I will use the term reflexive passive, and occasionally also reflexive impersonal, in order to refer to passive and impersonal constructions stemming out from reflexive markers, but no theoretical relevance should be attached to these terms. This is a field in which terminologies dramatically differ, and thus other labels -such as indeterminate reflexive(Turley 1998), middle voice(Kemmer 1993), and middle construction(Abraham 1995: 7-10;Steinbach 2002) -would be appropriate as well. In the interlinear glosses si is always glossed refl.3 The term Old Italian will be used to refer to the language of Tuscan documents of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Grammaticalization and prototype effects: A history of the agentive reflexive passive in Italian

Sansò

2011

Folia Linguistica Historica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The grammaticalization path reflexive > middle > anticausative > passive (> impersonal) has long been recognized as a well-attested pattern in grammar evolution (Kemmer 1993, Cennamo 1993, Wehr 1995, Parry 1998, among many others). Yet, the history of individual constructions of reflexive origin in various Romance languages reveals a number of unexpected facts that call the directionality of this path into question. The article traces the history of Italian passive constructions in which a reflexive marker is used (the so-called si-constructions), and shows that the range of uses of si-constructions has contracted considerably from the first vernacular documents to present-day Italian. In particular, reflexive passives in which the agent is coded overtly were much more frequent in Old Italian than in later stages of the language, and have eventually disappeared in present-day Italian. While grammaticalization models are, strictly speaking, unable to account for this contraction (or, perhaps, are not concerned with it), the dynamics of the process are straightforwardly accounted for by diachronic models in which the notions of prototype and prototype effects play a role. The historical data discussed in the article reflect a process of polarization consisting in the functionalization of an (embryonic) formal and semantic contrast between the si-construction and another passive construction, the so-called periphrastic passive (formed with essere, 'be' + past participle). These two constructions are preferentially associated with two distinct constellations of semantic traits in present-day Italian, but not (or at least not so sharply) in Old Italian.

show abstract

Section: The Reflexive Passive: Domains Of Usementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammaticalization and prototype effects: A history of the agentive reflexive passive in Italian

Sansò

2011

Folia Linguistica Historica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Constructions and pragmatics: Variable middle marking in Spanish subir(se) ‘go up’ and bajar(se) ‘go down’

Cacoullos

Schwenter

2008

Journal of Pragmatics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Profiling Discourse Participants

Cock

2014

Pragmatics &Amp; Beyond New Series

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The construction of discourse is a challenging field where many discourse structures and interactional effects remain poorly understood. This analysis provides a systematic explanation for the way in which discourse participants (speaker and hearer) are construed in Spanish through a corpus-driven analysis of informal conversation, TV-debates and parliamentary debates. It deals not only with person deixis, but with the full range of possibilities speakers choose from when profiling their self or their relationship with the interlocutor. This analysis also offers new insights into the operationalization of the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity as tools for the analysis of person reference and genre comparison. The comparative and corpus-driven approach offers methodological tools for genre analysis that can be transposed to other languages and/or genres. The detailed description of three socially highly relevant discourse types from a cognitive-functional perspective makes this book a useful resource not only for pragmatists but also for researchers in political and media discourse.

show abstract

A prototype analysis of Spanish indeterminate reflexive constructions

Cited by 44 publications

References 20 publications

Grammaticalization and prototype effects: A history of the agentive reflexive passive in Italian

Grammaticalization and prototype effects: A history of the agentive reflexive passive in Italian

Constructions and pragmatics: Variable middle marking in Spanish subir(se) ‘go up’ and bajar(se) ‘go down’

Profiling Discourse Participants

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About