The Antipassive as a Romance Phenomenon: a Case Study of ...

The Antipassive as a Romance Phenomenon: a Case Study of Italian Karina High

The University of Texas at Austin

This study examines diachronic and synchronic evidence for the antipassive construction in Italian, using data from the 13th to 21st centuries and focusing on the distribution of a particular class of pronominal verbs and their transitive counterparts, namely: ricordar(si)/ricordare `remind; remember', lamentar(si)/lamentare `pity; complain', and vantar(si) / vantare `praise; boast'. They are characterized by the realization of the logical object as an oblique complement (1a), which contrasts with the direct object complement of the transitive verb in (1b).

(1) a. Dopo aver

cercato

dappertutto, si

ricord?

after have.AUX.INF search.PP everywhere REFL.3SG remember.PFV.PAST.3SG

del

s og no

e corse

in giardino, vicino

of.DEF.DET.MSG dream.SG and run.PFV.PAST.3SG in garden.SG near

al

fiume, dove dormendo, l'=aveva

to.DEF.DET.MSG river.SG where sleep.GER OCL.3FSG=have.AUX.IPFV.PAST.3SG

veduta. see.PP

`After having searched everywhere, he remembered the dream and ran into the garden, near the river where sleeping, he had seen her.' (Collodi 1875)

b. Chiunque anyone

ricordi

la

vita italiana

remember.SBJV.PRES.3SG DEF.DET.FSG life.SG Italian.FSG

al

principio del

secolo

non

to.DEF.DET.MSG beginning.SG of.DEF.DET.MSG century.SG NEG

potr? can.FUT.3SG

non sottoscrivere a questo apprezzamento. NEG subscribe.INF to this.MSG comment.SG

`Whoever remembers the Italian life at the start of the century, cannot not subscribe to this comment.' (Salvatorelli 1943)

The above pronominal verbs, which cannot be termed reflexive, reciprocal, or middle/passive, attest to the heterogeneous nature of the Romance reflexive SE. Analyses have been proposed to capture different aspects of the diversity of Romance pronominal verbs, such as Nishida (1994) for Spanish and Melis (1985; 1990a; 1990b) for French, and some have discovered elements indicative of the antipassive (AP) construction, such as Masullo (1992) and Medov? (2009). To date, the historical work on the AP has been limited to non-Romance languages; for instance, Creissels (2012), Janic (2013), and Sans? (2017) identified the reflexive construction as one of several sources of the AP marker. These studies, however, do not look for supporting evidence from Romance; moreover, the current research on the Romance AP does not adopt a diachronic perspective.

The present study reveals that, in terms of the overall distribution of transitive (TR) and pronominal (PRO) verbs, PRO (69.3%) is more frequent than TR (30.7%). PRO verbs select finite and non-finite clausal complements more frequently than TR constructions do, while also selecting a

PP with NP complement. By contrast, TR verbs mostly select an NP complement or occur without a complement. TR and PRO differ most in the realization of their logical object. For transitive verbs, as in (1b) the logical object is realized as the direct object (NP); for pronominal verbs, as in (1a) it is realized as an oblique or, at the phrasal level, as a PP complement, headed by a preposition (di) and in which the logical object is embedded. The process involved can be described as the demotion or suppression of the logical object to an oblique, or a non-core argument, which is a defining property of the AP construction. Other AP properties are also observed, such as the presence of "verbal affixation" (Polinsky 2017:7), i.e., detransitivizing affixes, such as the reflexive si.

In the environment of a logical object, PRO lamentarsi is generally more common since the earliest texts of the corpus, while TR ricordare starts to dominate in the 19th century and TR vantare in the 18th century.

This study contributes to the discussion of the Romance reflexive SE, as well as to the work on AP constructions in accusative languages by proposing AP as a Romance phenomenon with chronological depth. The comparative and diachronic perspective, while still limited in its scope, enriches current studies of AP in Romance.

References

COLLODI, CARLO. 1875. I racconti delle fate. Florence: Paggi. CREISSELS, DENIS. 2012. The origin of antipassive markers in West Mande languages. 45th

Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, 1?18. Stockholm. . JANIC, KATARZYNA. 2013. The Slavonic languages and the development of the antipassive marker. Current Studies in Slavic Linguistics (Studies in Language Companion Series 146). Amsterdam.61?74. MASULLO, PASCUAL JOS?. 1992. Antipassive constructions in Spanish. Romance Languages and Modern Linguistic Theory.175?194. MEDOV?, LUCIE. 2009. Reflexive clitics in the Slavic and Romance languages. Doctoral diss., Princeton University. MELIS, LUDO. 1985. Le classement des tours pronominaux dans Le Bon Usage et dans la grammaire fran?aise contemporaine in Tradition grammaticale et linguistique: Le Bon Usage de Maurice Grevisse. Travaux de linguistique 12.159?175. MELIS, LUDO. 1990a. La voie pronominale. La syst?matique des tours pronominaux en fran?ais moderne. Paris/Louvain-la-Neuve: Duculot. MELIS, LUDO. 1990b. Pronominal Verbs in Old and Modern French, or How prototypes can be restructured on the basis of permanent meaning effects. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 5.87?108. NISHIDA, CHIYO. 1994. The Spanish reflexive clitic se as an aspectual class marker. Linguistics 32.425?458. POLINSKY, MARIA. 2017. 13. Antipassive. The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity, ed. by Jessica Coon, Diane Massam, and Lisa deMena Travis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . SALVATORELLI, LUIGI. 1943. Pensiero e azione del risorgimento. Torino: Einaudi. SANS?, ANDREA. 2017. Where do antipassive constructions come from? Diachronica 34.175?218.

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