realisation of the canonical event model (Langacker 1991: 285). AGENT. PATIENT ... entity initiating the action = the entity acted ... Jacek-NOM shave-PST siebie.
Behavioural profiles of reflexive-type markers in Polish Jarosław Józefowski
The University of Sheffield
Why reflexive-type markers in Polish? •
two markers • good testing ground for some theories
•
big abstract categories vs. usage data
•
linguists’ grammars vs. speakers’ grammars
Grammatical voice •
•
Grammatical voice allows the speaker to manipulate the construal of a given situation and alter its linguistic presentation (Langacker 2004: 65)
The active voice is a linguistic realisation of the canonical event model (Langacker 1991: 285)
AGENT
PATIENT
The reflexive voice vs the middle voice John shaved •
Reflexives and middles: the entity initiating the action = the entity acted upon
•
Difference: relative distinguishability of participants
John shaved himself
The voice continuum
One participant event
-
Middle
Reflexive
Two participant event
+
Degree of distinguishability Based on Kemmer (1993: 71)
The middle voice in Polish •
Accusative reflexive-type markers in Polish: się and siebie
•
SIĘ: • • •
•
a clitic tied to the verb it accompanies usually occurs either immediately before or immediately after the verb Tabakowska (2003): the exponent of the middle voice
SIEBIE: • • •
‘proper’ reflexive pronoun can occur in VPs, PPs, NPs, AdjPs Tabakowska (2003): the exponent of the reflexive voice
The middle voice in Polish, cont. (1a) Jacek
się
ogolił
Jacek-NOM się
shave-PST
‘Jacek shaved’ (1b) Jacek
ogolił
siebie
Jacek-NOM shave-PST siebie i
swojego dziadka
and his-ACC granddad-ACC ‘Jacek shaved himself and his granddad’
A couple of questions… •
Children do not confuse the two markers at all
•
Się + verb pairs are very formulaic; it would be difficult to arrive at their meaning compositionally •
One Polish dictionary lists more than 6000 się-verbs as entries separate from their non-się counterparts
•
Alternations between się and siebie are quite rare
•
Do these categories overlap?
Behavioural profiles of się and siebie Do the markers exhibit clear behavioural profiles, i.e. can contextual information be used to predict the choice of the marker?
Behavioural profiles of się and siebie: method and data •
Behavioural profile: morphological, syntactic and semantic characteristics of elements in a sentence (Divjak & Gries 2006: 28)
•
Corpus study of 250 independent examples of się and siebie each (500 contexts in total) • •
only finite verb constructions and infinitives data taken from the plTenTen Web corpus
Behavioural profiles of się and siebie: method and data •
Each context tagged for a number of variables: • • • • •
•
semantic class of a verb (based on Wordnet) agent type (human, other animate, inanimate, abstract) morphological and syntactic properties: position of the marker, verb + INF construction volitionality of action presence of the word sam ‘on one’s own’ (lit. ‘alone’)
Tagged data later analysed with correspondence analysis and logistic regression
Predictions SIĘ: •
motion verbs
•
less volitional actions (Dancygier 1997)
•
pre-verbal position
•
non-human agents
SIEBIE: •
verbs of perception, emotion, communication
•
volitional actions (Dancygier 1997)
•
human agents presence of sam
•
Correspondence analysis SIEBIE
SIĘ
Logistic regression Factors which predict siebie: • animate human agents (~1.83)
• presence of the word sam (~3.16)
• reciprocal situation types (~1.78)
• infinitives (~1.33)
• verbs of:
• communication (~2.3)
• emotion (~1.19)
• perception (~3.14)
• possession (~2.98)
• volitionally performed actions (~0.76)
Factors which predict się: • v-inf constructions (~1.12)
• pre-verbal position of the marker (~0.8)
R2 = 0.565
C = 0.892
Preliminary conclusions: siebie •
Siebie has a well delineated behavioural profile: • •
•
human agents, volitional actions, sam verbs of emotion, communication, perception, possession
Siebie behaves like a pronoun • •
indicates co-referentiality enters into ‘normal’ transitive semantics of a given verb
Preliminary conclusions: się •
Się appears to be quite a diffuse category
•
Się might be more of a formulaic lexical phenomenon than a big abstract conceptual category
•
It is likely that speakers’ mental grammars rely on lowerlevel schemas, e.g. lower-level schemas for different groups of verbs
