The Middle Voice and Connected Constructions in Ibero-Romance

Abstract

The reflexive constructions that are the focus of this book are the constructions broadly described with the term “middle”: i.e., those that can appear in all persons, and in which the reflexive marker (RM) cannot be understood as a full referential pronoun. One goal of this study is to provide a corpus-based typology of middle and related uses that allow us to compare the behaviour of the RM in these constructions with previous typological accounts, where competing models (based either on changes of diathesis or on the semantics of the verbal event) can be found. A second goal is to shed light on the evolution of the different functions of the RM, by exploring the factors that affect its productivity, with a specific focus on those verbs where reflexive marking is most variable, that is, anticausative verbs and verbs with no change of valency. These reflexive constructions show a notable difference in productivity in Spanish and Galician, although the languages are closely related and contiguous. The languages are thus good candidates for a contrastive and variationist analysis serving these two goals. The semantic class of the predicate, its aspectual properties and the animacy of the subject are some of the most relevant factors that are taken into account to understand the motivations behind the presence or absence of the RM. By relying on a corpus of interviews from rural communities across peninsular Spain (except Catalonia), space as a relevant extra-linguistic variable is taken into account, helping uncover previously unknown geographical patterns.

Non-Pronominal Intransitive Verb Variants with Property Interpretation: A Characterization

“…Following Schäfer (2008), whose work is, in turn, based on Haspelmath's (1993) typology, Vivanco (2016) distinguishes three verb classes in terms of their marking pattern: However, the classification of Spanish verbs in these three classes is far from straightforward, as De Benito Moreno (2022b) shows. Taking data from COSER (Fernández-Ordóñez 2005) as a point of departure, De Benito Moreno (2022b) adopts a corpus-based quantitative approach to the study of the anticausative alternation in Spanish, and she applies a generalized linear mixed model.…”

“…Taking data from COSER (Fernández-Ordóñez 2005) as a point of departure, De Benito Moreno (2022b) adopts a corpus-based quantitative approach to the study of the anticausative alternation in Spanish, and she applies a generalized linear mixed model. According to De Benito Moreno (2022b), whose study is restricted to European Spanish, verbs that behave like Class C verbs are much more numerous than assumed in the literature. She shows that the presence or absence of se depends on different factors, both linguistic and extralinguistic in nature.…”

“…As for the extralinguistic factors, De Benito Moreno (2022b) shows that the geographical variety strongly affects the presence of se. In fact, it is the second factor in general terms, just behind the frequency with which a verb is used in transitive structures.…”

“…In addition, NPPC is related to the anticausative construction (La camisa se secó al sol, 'The shirt dried in the sun') (Haspelmath 1993;Schäfer 2008 for a general point of view ;Mendikoetxea 1999a;Kailuweit 2013;Vivanco 2016Vivanco , 2017Fábregas 2021;De Benito Moreno 2022a, 2022b for the Spanish case, among many other works). On one hand, a transitive verb appears in an intransitive variant.…”

“…On the other hand, some of the verbs involved in the anticausative construction can optionally appear without the clitic se (La puerta abrió, 'The door opened'). According to De Benito Moreno (2022a, 2022b, in the anticausative construction, the presence or absence of this marker depends on different factors, both linguistic (animacy of the subject, presence of a non-reflexive dative, negation, among others) and extralinguistic (dialectal variety, type of text) in nature. However, it is not frequent to find studies in which a connection is established among these three constructions 2 .…”