Reflexives as subjects?

[Balthasar Bickel]

Frans Plank wrote:
>
> I've once (in Studies in Lg 17, 1993) been puzzling over reflexives (if
> this is what they are) in such passive constructions as these, permissible
> for (many) speakers of German (and a few other languages):
>
> Wird sich taeglich gewaschen?
> is.3SG REFL daily washed
> 'Does one wash oneself daily?'
>
> Hier wird sich nur von mir die Haende gewaschen.
> here is.3SG.SBJ REFL (3rd person) only by me the hands (ACC=NOM) washed
> 'It's only myself who washes his hands here'
>
> I found them odd with respect to control:  only subjects are supposed to
> control reflexives, while here the (semantic) controllers would seem to be
> the agents (usually indefinite and omitted).  But then grammatical
> relations aren't so obvious in such passives in the first place (as shown
> by uncertainties in verb agreement and case marking).
>
> Maybe the reflexives themselves are the grammatical subjects of such
> passives, instead of being morphosyntactically controlled by the elusive
> dummy subject ES 'it'.

South Asian languages usually allow reflexives controlled by agents in
the passive (especially in the 'ability' passive); see Lust et al.
[eds.] "Lexical Anaphors and Pronouns in Selected South Asian Languages"
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 2000. A close parallel to the German case
would be the following Gujarati example (Mistry, p. 352):

Raaj-thi potaane  naa vakhaaNaayo
R-INSTR  REFL:DAT not praised:PASS
'Raaj could not praise himself'

This is yet another instance of what seems to be a subject reflexive.
(The reflexive here is in the dative/accusative case, but this is a
general possibility of passive subjects in Indo-Aryan.)

-- Balthasar Bickel.