reflexives in subject position

Balthasar Bickel bickel at uclink.berkeley.edu
Tue Feb 15 18:08:42 UTC 2000


John Myhill wrote:
> Regarding the ostensible reflexives in subject position: Are the people
> who have suggested them (in e.g. Georgian, Nepali) sure that these aren't
> logophoric/long-range 'reflexives'? In Japanese, 'jibun', the ostensible

I agree, this distinction is very important to make, and not only that:
Nepali also allows exophoric uses of the reflexives, similar to the
emphatic uses that Edith Moravcsik talked about yesterday and that Nino
Amiridze discussed his reply. In the construction I quoted, however, we
are dealing with a truly anaphoric (more precisely, kataphoric) use of
the reflexive. There is no need nor suggestion in the clause to construe
any exophoric or discourse bearing. What's crucial about the Nepali
construction (based on a preliminary analysis) is that this is the
standard way of indicating coreference between A and O if (a) the
speaker wants to indicate a non-volitional meaning, and (b) the clause
involves a psychological predicate.

> John Myhill asked whether it has anything to do with the subject being in
> the ergative?
> > Can you do the same thing with a sentence in the present, when the
> subject is > in the nominative?
> Georgian can have a reflexive in the subject position no matter the tense:

The same is true of Nepali:

aaphu    Raam-laaii barbaad  gar-cha
REFL:NOM R.-DAT     spoiling do-3SG.PT
'Ram will get himself spoiled.'

This is important to note because the Nepali ergative also covers
instrumental uses and on the face of it, 'aaphaile' (or 'aaphule') could
also be analyzed as an instrumental rather than an ergative. Unlike an
instrumental NP, 'aaphaile' alternates with the nominative in non-past
and non-perfective contexts, whence such an analysis would not hold up.


-- Balthasar Bickel.




__________________________________________

Balthasar Bickel
University of California at Berkeley
Department of Slavic Languages
6303 Dwinelle Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-2979
Phone:    +1-510-848 4875 (home)
Fax:      +1-510-642 6220 (office)
E-Mail:   bickel at socrates.berkeley.edu
Web Site: socrates.berkeley.edu/~bickel
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