Semantics and Pragmatics of the "Reflexive" Verbs

Abstract

This book represents a revised version o f a 1991 Yale University Ph.D. dissertation. While one chapter of the original dissertation will be published separately as an article, one additional chapter (Chapter 3) was added. All original chapters underwent substantial revisions and updating. I would like to thank Olga Yokoyama for rescuing the project, Laura Janda for suggesting that it be published. Valentina Zaitseva for her careful reading and her many suggestions, and Dr. Peter Rchder for accepting it for publication. My thanks also go to George Fowler for providing the font for the transliterations o f the Russian examples.

Ways of attenuating agency in Russian

“…The typical interpretation for impersonal constructions capitalises on the absence of a grammatical subject encoding the obvious human instigator and posits ‘the unknown’ (Wierzbicka 1988: 233) that imposes things upon the subject from outside (Israeli 1997: 21). Some things just are beyond our control: every now and then, we find ourselves governed by uncontrollable passions, and confronted with the limits of knowledge and reason, we are forced to acknowledge the existence of fate or destiny.…”

El sujeto y la subjetividad: Variación del pronombre yo en géneros conversacionales y de los medios de comunicación del español de Canarias

“…La dimensión gradual de la 'objetividad-subjetividad', por tanto, se entiende como una consecuencia del uso de las distintas variantes del sujeto pronominal y el significado cognitivo que aportan cada una de ellas. Cuando la gramática ofrece distintas posibilidades de describir la realidad, la elección del hablante puede ser indicativa de un enfoque orientado cognitivamente hacia la subjetividad (Israeli, 1997;Scheibman, 2001), lo cual, al mismo tiempo, muestra la evidencia de que las estructuras gramaticales sirven a distintos propósitos comunicativos en el discurso, como es el caso del uso de la primera persona del paradigma pronominal (Englebretson, 2007).…”

When come and go go necessive

“…The following example, from one of Krylov's Fables, suggests that the use of prišlo where prišlos' would be required in contemporary Russian may have been permissible into the first half of the 19th century, at least in the literary language: 35 Guiraud-Weber (1984: 214-39) provides an alternative taxonomy. 38 Besides Gerritsen (1990), the semantic import of reflexivization in Russian has been studied in depth by Israeli (1997), among others. She notes that the divisions between these domains are fluid and offers as an example the "polysemy" of mne prixoditsja, which can mean "I am compelled" or "I have the opportunity" (more on this topic below).…”