The rise of middle voice systems

Inglese, Guglielmo

doi:10.1075/dia.20058.ing

Cited by 46 publications

References 106 publications

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How fear developed from an object to a subject experiencer verb

Zimmermann

2024

JHL

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This paper offers quantitative observations on the argument structural change from object to subject experiencers for the verb fear (from causative ‘frighten’ to stative ‘feel fear’) during late medieval and Early Modern English. The empirical statements are based on a corpus of 7.5m words spanning 1350–1600. The paper explores the precise time course of the change, disambiguating cues and ambiguous contexts, the influence of other lexical items, and other facts. In so doing, it reconstructs the history of the argument structure change in fear. It introduces a concept of “polysemous competition” as a more abstract type of change exemplified by this specific case, presents a survey of observable phenomena that may generally accompany such a development, and discusses other implications.

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How fear developed from an object to a subject experiencer verb

Zimmermann

2024

JHL

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Underspecification and ambiguity of voice markers

Giomi,

Inglese

2024

Pragmatics &Amp; Beyond New Series

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Voice markers have a notorious cross-linguistic tendency towards multifunctionality, in that a given marker can encode more than one voice operation at a time, such as reflexive and passive. In addition, diachronic typological research has also shown that patterns of multifunctionality of voice markers historically come about following paths that are not necessarily unidirectional. Taking stock of these premises, in this paper we propose a new typology of voice markers grounded on the notion of underspecification and ambiguity, and, by adopting the perspective of Functional Discourse Grammar, we argue that the lack of unidirectionality in the grammaticalization of voice markers follows from their status as interface operators.

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The Middle Voice and Connected Constructions in Ibero-Romance

Moreno

2022

Studies in Language Variation

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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.

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The rise of middle voice systems

Cited by 46 publications

References 106 publications

How fear developed from an object to a subject experiencer verb

How fear developed from an object to a subject experiencer verb

Underspecification and ambiguity of voice markers

The Middle Voice and Connected Constructions in Ibero-Romance

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