Abstract
The -st morpheme in Icelandic resembles Romance and Slavic reflexive clitics and some Germanic simplex reflexives in that it is associated with a number of different uses on various verbs; this includes, among other uses, a middle/anticausative, a reciprocal, and a reflexive use. The reflexive use of -st is, however, much more restricted than that of typical reflexive clitics. In this article, I discuss in detail one particular class of reflexive -st verb, which I will refer to as the ‘figure reflexive’. With figure reflexive constructions, the subject bears an external agentive Θ-role and is also understood as a ‘figure’ with respect to a spatial ‘ground’, in the sense of Talmy (1985). I discuss two questions that reflexive -st verbs raise for a syntactic view of argument structure: what is the relationship between anticausatives and reflexives, and where does lexical idiosyncrasy arise? For the first question, I propose to analyze -st as an argument expletive, which in figure reflexive constructions is merged in SpecpP (cf. Svenonius 2003, 2007), but in anticausatives is merged in SpecVoiceP. Only in the former case can the Θ-role survive in semantics, which is argued to derive from the fact that VoiceP dominates pP, and not the other way around. For the second question, I argue that there are two separate issues: the first is the syntactic distribution of -st (which limits the kinds of reflexive -st verbs that can exist) and the second is the integration of roots into abstract event structure. This analysis supports a model of grammar where the semantics interprets the syntax, but the syntax operates autonomously from semantics: interpretation is determined ‘late’, just like phonological forms are.
Notes
The following abbreviations are used in the glosses in this article: 3 = 3rd person, acc = accusative, act = active morphology, dat = dative, expl = expletive, gen = genitive, inf = infinitive, na = -na morphology, nom = nominative, pl = plural, prs = present, pst = past, ptcp = participle, refl = reflexive, sg = singular, st = -st morphology, subj = subject.
Though Schäfer (2008:258ff.) analyzes the bound reflexive use of sich as resulting from an Agree relation between sich and its antecedent, one might consider the possibility that some subset of sich constructions involve reflexivization by expletivization, as proposed below for reflexive -st verbs. This must be left for future research, however.
As will be clear below, however, I agree with Jónsson (2011:105–106) that -st is not simply a “bound variant” of the reflexive pronoun.
The word dyrnar ‘the door’ is semantically singular, but formally plural (cf. Sigurðsson 2009).
Thanks to Einar Freyr Sigurðsson for pointing out some of these examples and discussing them with me.
Ottósson (1986) states this in terms of inflection (productive) versus derivation (non-productive).
Original: “Miðmyndarsagnir sem taldar hafa verið til afturbeygilega flokksins hafa yfirleitt ekki hreina afturbeygilega merkingu, heldur einhverja sérhæfðari merkingu.” See also Jónsson (2005:398) for the same claim.
One might consider the possibility that it is a restructuring predicate, since the latter often show such mixed properties (Wurmbrand 1998, 2004; Cinque 2006; Legate 2012:499–502). However, restructuring predicates often have very small complements, and the infinitival complement of segjast can be headed by rather high modal verbs like munu ‘will’ and skulu ‘shall’; moreover (as originally pointed out to me by Einar Freyr Sigurðsson), the infinitives vary morphologically depending on the tense of the matrix verb.
- (i)
Since MoodPSpeech Act is the highest projection in Cinque’s (2006) hierarchy, it is possible that (i) is compatible with a restructuring analysis of segjast; however, developing such an analysis, relating it to -st morphology and the wealth of complex facts in the literature will have to wait for future research.
For example, prepositions exhibit selectional restrictions on the ground and determine its case in a way that they do not with the figure. (See Sect. 5 for some relevant case-marking facts.) The interpretation of the ground is also much more dependent on the preposition than the figure is. For example, on specifies that its ground be interpreted as a surface, whereas in specifies a container ground. By contrast, alternating between on/in has no interpretive effect on the figure. Space restrictions prevent me from arguing for these conclusions here, but see Svenonius (2003, 2007).
Many Icelandic verbs undergo vowel shifts which are sensitive to tense, mood, number and participial contexts. For consistency, in this article, I will notate the root using the stem form of the perfect participle.
However, note that no entity need be in a ‘broken’ state after such an event; some property of the path is expected to prevent its traversal by the subject, but this property is ‘broken’ by the subject/agent as it successfully crosses the path. This property could be a law, a societal rule, a security system, etc. See Sect. 6 for discussion of the semantic contribution of verbal roots in figure reflexives.
The sentences in (24) are due to Halldór Sigurðsson (p.c.). The sentence in (23a) is slightly adapted from a sentence found in an online newspaper article (http://www.sunnlenska.is/ithrottir/7103.html).
Thanks to Einar Freyr Sigurðsson for judgments of the verbs on this list, as well as to Björg Jóhannsdóttir and Erla Skúladóttir for extensive discussion. Thanks also to Merrill Kaplan for an interesting discussion of the roots of many of the verbs on this list.
Thanks to Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson for pointing out this contrast to me.
The structure of troðast undir ‘get trampled’ will be the same as (47), except, of course, the vP-internal structure will involve a pP. Note that in the present framework, there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as an unaccusative or anticausative verb, only an unaccusative or anticausative structure.
Andrews (1990) made this point for segjast ‘say of oneself’, but it holds for reflexive -st verbs in general. The analysis presented below will address the impossibility of a long-distance reflexive interpretation of -st, but an analysis of long-distance reflexives in general is beyond the scope of the present study.
Nothing would change in the analysis if it were assumed that the node occupied by -st were simply invisible at semantics.
I will not, in this article, provide an analysis of the fact that direct object dative case is preserved in the passive but not the anticausative (though see Sect. 5 for some discussion). For proposals that are directly compatible with the present assumptions, see Schäfer (2008:279–281), Sigurðsson (2012a:204–205), and Wood (2012:132); see also Svenonius (2006).
Like Greek, Albanian and Latin, Icelandic can use the same preposition (af) to introduce a causing event in anticausatives and an agent in passives (cf. Kallulli 2007). The preposition við in (45b) more strongly implies temporal simultaneity than does af in (45a). Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson (p.c.) finds the sentences in (45) a bit strange, since splundrast ‘shatter’ implies an immediate, punctual event and þrýstingurinn ‘the pressure’, for him, implies a slower process; höggbylgjan ‘the shockwave’ works better for him. Some speakers find af-phrase slightly degraded here as well, though everyone I know of accepts the við-phrase.
See Eythórsson (1995:242) for a related analysis. Note that in Sigurðsson (2012a) argument-introducing heads are merged higher than the arguments they license thematically; (47) is the translation of Sigurðsson’s (2012a) analysis into the present framework, which is more directly related to the system in Schäfer (2008).
Here, I abstract away from the label of the node dominating the root and its DP sister. Either the root itself could project the label (Embick 2004; Schäfer 2008) or the DP could project the label (Irwin 2012; Wood 2012; Marantz 2013). The exact syntax of roots is orthogonal to present purposes, and though labeling is an interesting issue in its own right (Lohndal 2012; Sigurðsson 2012b; Chomsky 2013), it does not directly bear on the present proposal.
In principle, it would be possible for Voice to introduce a Θ-role if a higher head could induce existential closure over the entity variable bearing that role, yielding a passive-like semantics; see Wood (2012:279ff.) for discussion of a construction where this happens. It would also be possible to pass an agent role to a higher verb in an ECM construction, though I do not know of any convincing cases where this happens (see e.g. the discussion of segjast ‘say’ in Sect. 2); it might be that unsaturated Θ-roles cannot cross phase boundaries.
We might ask why the syntax would project a structural layer which is not used semantically. The basic insight here is that syntax is not looking ahead to see how semantics is going to interpret the structures it builds, just as it is not looking ahead to see how the structures will be pronounced in the phonological component. The basic architecture of the grammar, with spellout to the interfaces, leads us to expect this state of affairs: not all nodes need an overt pronunciation, and not all nodes need an ‘overt interpretation’. This issue could be discussed at considerable length, but that would go far beyond the present proposal, which is certainly not alone in assuming that some syntactic elements (e.g. expletives) serve a syntactic and perhaps morphological purpose without necessarily getting a semantic interpretation themselves (cf. also the linkers studied in Den Dikken 2006).
See Anagnostopoulou (2003) for an analysis generating Icelandic dative indirect objects in SpecApplP along the lines of the double object construction (rather than the prepositional dative) (see also Collins and Thráinsson 1996; Jónsson 1996; Sigurðsson 2012a). If datives were internally rather than externally merged in this position (cf. Den Dikken 1995; see also Collins and Thráinsson 1996:428, fn.49), then the generalization in Sect. 5 might get a different explanation from the one advanced there. For reasons independent of the concerns of this article, I assume the structures relevant for Icelandic here are ‘low applicatives’, where Appl merges with what would otherwise be the complement of v (see Wood 2012:225ff.). The results of the present study, however, would be completely compatible with a high applicative structure, where the complement of Appl is vP.
See Wood (2012:300–308) for discussion of examples like klæðast ‘get dressed’. I suspect that the impossibility of merging -st in the direct object position is related to the properties of argument-introducing heads that make them distinct from the event-introducing head v that merges with direct objects (see Wood 2012:15ff. for some discussion). The introduction of -st involves a (sub-)property of the D-feature of those heads; one possibility is that it is introduced in the manner outlined in Svenonius (2012) rather than by traditional Merge.
Genitive direct objects behave like dative objects in this respect (Sigurðsson 1989:270).
Thanks especially to Einar Freyr Sigurðsson and Höskuldur Thráinsson for discussing (66) with me.
I thank a reviewer for providing (69). Example (69b) has a somewhat unlikely, but grammatical, anticausative reading, for example if the goal keeper was thrown from a moving train and fell on the ball. The point here is that it has no figure reflexive reading.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for constructing the pair in (71).
That is, similar to morphological readjustment rules on roots, which seem to involve analogous issues. For example, some English verbal roots with the vowel [aj] in the present tense instead have [o] in the past tense, such as drive/drove, rise/rose, write/wrote, etc.; in many varieties of English (including mine), but not all, this extends to dive/dove. For such readjustment rules, there is a systematic tendency for roots with certain phonological properties to readjust, but the roots to which readjustment rules apply must be listed as such (Albright and Hayes 2003; Embick 2008). The same could ultimately hold for the semantics of roots.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Chris Barker, Stephanie Harves, Richard Kayne, Alec Marantz, Neil Myler, and Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson, along with three anonymous NLLT reviewers, for very helpful, extensive comments on various versions of this paper. I have benefitted tremendously from their insights. Thanks to the audiences where this work has been presented, including University of Iceland, Lund University, University of Stuttgart, University of California Berkeley, University of Maryland and University of Minnesota. Much of the Icelandic data comes from my own fieldwork with Icelandic speakers in New York City, to whom I would like to express my utmost gratitude for their time and patience with me. Special thanks to Erla Skúladóttir, Björg Jóhannsdóttir, Júlia Hermannsdóttir, and Hallvarður Ásgeirsson, who have spent the most time patiently answering my questions. I am also extremely grateful to Ásgrímur Angantýsson, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson, Hlíf Árnadóttir, Höskuldur Thráinsson, Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson, Kristín Jóhannsdóttir, Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir, and Thórhallur Eythórsson for patiently discussing quite a bit of Icelandic data with me. I am also indebted to the following people for discussions related to this work: Artemis Alexiadou, Dalina Kallulli, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, Inna Livitz, Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson, Marcel Pitteroff, Florian Schäfer, Dominika Skrzypek, Peter Svenonius, Thórhallur Eythórsson and Matthew Whelpton. Finally, thanks to Marcel Den Dikken for his encouragement and some final, but important comments. I am responsible for any errors in this article.
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Wood, J. Reflexive -st verbs in Icelandic. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 32, 1387–1425 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9243-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9243-y