Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
3.1.6
Reflexivization Many languages have special pronouns, called reflexive pronouns, that are used to indicate that an np is coreferential with an np bearing a certain structural relationship to it. In many languages, such pronouns are used when an np is to be coreferential with the subject of a clause that contains it. 178 Avery D. Andrews One such language is Malayalam (Mohanan (1982)). Malayalam has free word order, expressing grammatical relations by np marking. nps in a/s function are nominative, ps are accusative if animate, nominative if inanimate. In this language, the reflexive possessive pronoun swan.t.am requires an antecedent which is a subject (either of the clause immediately containing swan.t.am, or of some higher one). Therefore the following two sentences are good, even though swan.t.am follows its antecedent in the first and precedes it in the second, since in both cases the antecedent is subject: (69) a. Raajaaw ə swan.t.am bhaaryaye n ¯ ulli king(nom) self’s wife(acc) pinched b. Swan.t.am bhaaryaye raajaaw ə n ¯ ulli self’s wife(acc) king(nom) pinched ‘The king pinched his own wife’ But when an attempted antecedent is an object, the result is ungrammatical: (70) *Raajaawine swan.t.am bhaarya n ¯ ulli king(acc) self’s wife(nom) pinched ‘His own wife pinched the king’ These examples show that reflexivization depends on the grammatical rela- tions rather than on linear order. Like English, Malayalam has a passive construction in which the argument expressed as an object in the active is expressed as the subject, and the argument expressed as the subject in the active is expressed as an instrumental (with the ending -aal). The interaction of reflexivization with passivization shows it to be dependent on grammatical relations rather than semantic roles such as agent and patient. The controller of the reflexive has to be the subject even when in the passive construction the subject is the patient: (71) a. Raajaaw ə swan.t.am bhaaryaal n ¯ ullappet ¯ t ¯ u king(nom) self’s wife(instr) pinch(past.pass) b. Swan.t.am bhaaryaal raajaaw ə n ¯ ullappet ¯ t ¯ u self’s wife(instr) king(nom) pinch(past.pass) ‘The king was pinched by his own wife’ (72) *Raajaawinaal swan.t.am bhaarya n ¯ ullappet ¯ t ¯ u king(instr) self’s wife(nom) pinch(past.pass) ‘His own wife was pinched by the king’ Malayalam shares with Icelandic the feature of having nps that lack some of the usual coding properties of subjects, but show some of their other grammati- cal properties, as do many other of the languages of South Asia (Masica (1971); Verma and Mohanan (1990)). In Malayalam, most verbs take subjects in the The major functions of the noun phrase 179 nominative (unmarked) case, but some seem to have subjects in the dative case as a lexical property. Also certain derivational affixes, such as the desiderative -an.am, impose the requirement that the derived verb take a dative subject (if a verb v means ‘to X’, the verb V-an.am means ‘to want to X’). Reflexivization provides one of the arguments that these datives are indeed subjects, since they can antecede swan.t.am, while dative recipients with ordinary verbs of giving cannot: (73) a. Raajaawin ə swan.t.am bhaaryaye n ¯ ull-an.am king(dat) self’s wife(dat) pinch-desiderative ‘The king wants to pinch his wife’ b. Raajaawin ə swan.t.am bhaaryaye s.t.am-aan ə king(dat) self’s wife(acc) liking-is ‘The king likes his wife’ c. *Raajaaw ə makalikk ə swan.t.am bhartaawine kot.ut ¯ t ¯ u king(nom) daughter(dat) self’s husband(acc) give(past) ‘The king gave his daughter her husband’ In a similar fashion, reflexivization also provides evidence for dative subjects in various other South Asian languages, such as Hindi (Kachru, Kachru, and Bhatia (1976)). Download 1.59 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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