The Middle Voice and Connected Constructions in Ibero-Romance
A variationist and dialectal account
Author
The reflexive constructions that are the focus of this book are the constructions broadly described with the term “middle”: i.e., those that can appear in all persons, and in which the reflexive marker (RM) cannot be understood as a full referential pronoun. One goal of this study is to provide a corpus-based typology of middle and related uses that allow us to compare the behaviour of the RM in these constructions with previous typological accounts, where competing models (based either on changes of diathesis or on the semantics of the verbal event) can be found. A second goal is to shed light on the evolution of the different functions of the RM, by exploring the factors that affect its productivity, with a specific focus on those verbs where reflexive marking is most variable, that is, anticausative verbs and verbs with no change of valency. These reflexive constructions show a notable difference in productivity in Spanish and Galician, although the languages are closely related and contiguous. The languages are thus good candidates for a contrastive and variationist analysis serving these two goals. The semantic class of the predicate, its aspectual properties and the animacy of the subject are some of the most relevant factors that are taken into account to understand the motivations behind the presence or absence of the RM. By relying on a corpus of interviews from rural communities across peninsular Spain (except Catalonia), space as a relevant extra-linguistic variable is taken into account, helping uncover previously unknown geographical patterns.
[Studies in Language Variation, 29] 2022. ix, 375 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements | pp. ix–10
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Chapter 1. Reflexive constructions: An introduction | pp. 1–42
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Chapter 2. Methodology | pp. 43–58
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Chapter 3. The middle voice in Spanish | pp. 59–118
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Chapter 4. Anticausative verbs in Spanish | pp. 119–156
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Chapter 5. Reflexive intransitive verbs | pp. 157–214
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Chapter 6. Reflexive transitive verbs | pp. 215–280
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Chapter 7. Conclusions | pp. 281–288
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References | pp. 289–300
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Appendices
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Appendix 1. Localities interviewed with the corpus COSER | pp. 301–304
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Appendix 2. Questionnaire videos | pp. 305–310
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Appendix 3. Localities interviewed with the questionnaire | pp. 311–312
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Appendix 4. List of analysed verbs and their classification | pp. 313–368
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Appendix 5. List of verbs analysed in corpus eseuTenTen11 | pp. 369–372
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Index | pp. 373–375
“[A] significant contribution to studies of reflexive marking and the middle voice. It offers a firm basis for further research on the many relevant questions addressed and towards the development of cross-linguistically valid theoretical models of reflexivity as well as, more generally, of voice and diathesis.”
Miguel A. Aijón Oliva, Universidad de Salamanca, in Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 42 (2023).
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
de Benito Moreno, Carlota
Felíu Arquiola, Elena
Heidinger, Steffen & Richard Huyghe
Octavio de Toledo y Huerta, Álvaro S. & Mar Garachana Camarero
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Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CFB: Sociolinguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009050: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Sociolinguistics