Reflexives as subjects?

[Frans Plank]

>From: abraham <W.O.G.Abraham at let.rug.nl>
>Organization: Faculteit der Letteren, RuG, NL
>To: Frans.Plank at uni-konstanz.de
>Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 14:06:17 +0200
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Subject: Re: Reflexives as subjects?
>Reply-to: abraham at let.rug.nl
>Priority: normal
>
>Frans:
>
>I have done extensive work on German middles and have always
>considered these 'reflexives' (qua form only) as passive morphemes
>binding (in my terminology) the subject theta role. In other words,
>the reflexive (mirrorred by pers. pron.s in other paradigmatic
>persons) is a free grammatical morpheme, much like any bound
>passive morpheme in l's such as Latin and Anc. Greek. This
>correlates nicely with other distributional facts: true reflexive
>construals cannot be passivized; control constructions (without a
>visible subject) do take medial embeddings (your example), which
>would otherwise remain without a plausible explanation. See my
>book 1995 "Deutsche Syntax im Sprachenvergleich", ch. 12:
>'Verbgenus unbd Reflexivitaet'. Notice the position adopted by
>Haspelmath (Diachronica, I believe, some years back) that passive
>(and, in extenso, medium) is a verb-bound phenomenon, which has
>nothing to do with any larger construal relations. In the very same
>sense: medial 'sich' can be taken as a predicate suffix (relating,
>however, in meaningful way, passive syntax and reflexive binding).
>Notice also that most Germanic languages do not give a special
>form to this passive-like medium: English, Dutch, Frisian. And the
>Scandinavian l's have it on a par with the reflexive passive.
>	Best! Werner
>
>
>Date sent:      	Thu, 17 Feb 2000 11:18:35 +0000
>Send reply to:  	Frans Plank <Frans.Plank at UNI-KONSTANZ.DE>
>From:           	Frans Plank <Frans.Plank at UNI-KONSTANZ.DE>
>Subject:        	Reflexives as subjects?
>To:             	LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>
>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'.
>
>Frans Plank
>
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>*   Werner Abraham                                                   *
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