S éminaire UMR 7023: Conférence de D. Kallulli sur =?iso-8859-1?Q?les_r=E9flexifs=2C_?=Saint-Denis, 17 oct

[Jean-Louis Aroui]

L'UMR 7023 a le plaisir de vous convier, dans le cadre des séances de son
séminaire (http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/-Seminaire-de-l-UMR-7023,50-.html),

le lundi 17 octobre 2011
10h00-12h00,
Université Paris VIII, 2, rue de la liberté, 93200 Saint-Denis (métro
Saint-Denis Université, ligne 13), bâtiment D, salle D 328 (ATTENTION :
SALLE INHABITUELLE)

à une conférence de Dalina Kallulli (University of Vienna)

intitulée

“At first it's unfamiliar then it strikes root: reflexives that do not
behave themselves”

Résumé :
In this talk I will discuss so-called “inherent” reflexive verbs (e.g.
'behave/devote oneself' in English, 'se suicider' in French, 'sich
schämen' in German, 'vergognarsi' in Italian), in which the reflexive
element does not correspond to a semantic argument (cf. *'I behaved
John'). I argue that inherent reflexives are the counterparts of so-called
“deponent” verbs familiar from traditional grammars of Latin, in the sense
that the reflexive element in them is the counterpart of the ‘deponent’
(i.e. 'passive' as opposed to 'active') inflection in Latin and other
languages with distinct conjugational voice paradigms. In turn, the
correlations I draw between inherent reflexives and deponents throw new
light on the directionality of transitivity alternations and on the issue
whether and what kind of meaning ‘roots’ encode. Crucially, I contend
that: (i) inherent reflexives (and their deponent counterparts) are ‘root’
formations, specifically from nominal and/or adjectival roots, i.e.
conforming to the schema [x [x √NOUN/ADJ]]; (ii) inherent reflexives
(and deponents in languages that have them) lack an external argument in
the syntax. Building on the idea that overt morphological voice markings
reflect a subset of the feature distinctions associated with v0 in the
syntax, aka ‘flavors-of-v’ accounts (Folli & Harley 2005), the central
claim that I put forward is that ‘deponent’ morphology, be it
non-active/passive or reflexive (depending on the language), relates to an
'actor-initiation' feature (Kallulli 2007) of v° in syntactic
configurations lacking an external argument (Embick 1997, 2000, 2004).

References cited:

Embick, David. 1997. Voice and the interfaces of syntax. Doctoral
Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania.

Embick, David. 2000. Features, syntax, and categories in the Latin
Perfect. Linguistic Inquiry 31:185-230.

Embick, David. 2004. Unaccusative syntax and verbal alternations. In A.
Alexiadou et al. (eds.) The Unaccusativity Puzzle 137-158. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Folli, Raffaella & Heidi Harley. 2005. Flavours of v: consuming results in
Italian and English. In P. Kempchinsky & R. Slabakova (eds.) Aspectual
Enquiries 95-120. Dordrecht: Springer.

Kallulli, Dalina. 2007. Rethinking the passive/anticausative distinction.
Linguistic Inquiry 38:770-780.




-- 
Jean-Louis AROUI
Université Paris 8
UFR des Sciences du Langage
2, rue de la liberté
93200 Saint-Denis
FRANCE
http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/-Aroui-Jean-Louis-.html

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