The facilitative middle in Baltic and North Slavonic
An overview of its variation
Abstract
The article deals with the facilitative middle, a gram often simply referred to (especially in literature of the formal persuasion) as ‘the middle’ (e.g., The bread cuts easily). While in the Western European languages this gram is nearly exclusively generic or individual-level (kind-level) and has no explicit agent (these features are correspondingly often regarded as definitional for ‘middles’), the Baltic and Slavonic languages have constructions that arguably belong to the same gram-type but often represent stage-level predications, with a non-generic agent that is optionally expressed by an oblique noun phrase or prepositional phrase, or is contextually retrievable. The article gives an overview of the parameters of variation in the facilitative constructions of a number of Baltic and Slavonic languages (individual- or kind-level and stage-level readings, aspect, transitivity, expression of the agent, presence or absence of adverbial modifiers etc.). The semantics of the different varieties is discussed, as well as their lexical input. Attention is given to the grammaticalisation path and to what made the Balto-Slavonic type of facilitatives so markedly different from their counterparts in Western European languages.
Keywords
middle, facilitative, reflexive, Lithuanian, Latvian, Russian, Slavonic
References
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Alexiadou, Artemis. 2014. Active, middle and passive. The morpho-syntax of Voice. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 13, 19–40.
Alexiadou, Artemis & Edit Doron. 2012. The syntactic construction of two non-active voices: passive and middle. Journal of Linguistics 48.1, 1–34.
Arkadiev, Peter. 2011. Aspect and actionality in Lithuanian on a typological background. In: Daniel Petit, Claire le Feuvre & Henri Menantaud, eds., Langues baltiques, langues slaves. Paris: Editions CNRS, 61–92.
Arkadiev, Peter. 2014. Towards an areal typology of prefixal perfectivization. Scando-Slavica 2014, 384–405.
Arkadiev, Peter. 2015. Areal’naja tipologija prefiksal’nogo perfektiva [Areal Typology of the Prefixal Perfective]. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury.
Bogusławski, Andrzej. 1985. The Problem of the negated imperative in perfective verbs revisited. Russian Linguistics 9.2–3, 225–239.
Carlson, Greg. 1977. Reference to Kinds in English. New York: Garland.
Condoravdi, Cleo. 1989. The middle: Where semantics and morphology meet. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 11, 18–30.
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
Delbrück, Berthold. 1897. Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen. 2. Teil. Straßburg: Trübner.
Dickey, Stephen M. 2000. Parameters of Slavic Aspect. A Cognitive Approach. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Fagan, Sarah. 1992. The Syntax and Semantics of Middle Constructions: A Study with Special Reference to German. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Faltz, Leonard M. 1977. Reflexivization. A Study in Universal Syntax. PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley.
Fellbaum, Christiane. 1985. Adverbs in agentless actives and passives. Chicago Linguistic Society 2, 21–31.
Fici [Fiči], Francesca. 2011. Ob odnoj modal’noj funkcii refleksivnyx konstrukcij [On a certain modal function of reflexive constructions]. In: Slovo i jazyk. Sbornik statej k vos’midesjatiletiju akademika Ju. D. Apresjana [Word and Language. For Academician Ju. D. Apresjan on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday], 645–652. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury.
Garde, Paul. 1985. O tak nazyvaemyx “simpatičeskix” padežax v sovremennom russkom jazyke [On the so-called ‘sympathetic’ cases in Modern Russian]. Russian Linguistics 9.2–3, 181–196.
Geniušienė, Emma. 1987. The Typology of Reflexives. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gerritsen, Nelleke. 1990. Russian Reflexive Verbs. In Search of Unity in Diversity. Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi.
Goto, Ksenija V. & Sergej S. Saj. 2009. Častotnye xarakteristiki klassov russkix refleksivnyx glagolov [Frequency characteristics of Russian reflexive verb classes]. In: Ksenija L. Kiseleva et al., eds., Korpusnye issledovanija po russkoj grammatike. Moskva: Probel-2000, 184–223.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations. In: Bernard Comrie & Maria Polinsky, eds., Causatives and Transitivity. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 87–120.
Holvoet, Axel. 2001. Studies in the Latvian Verb. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego.
Holvoet, Axel. 2014. Phasal and proximative complementation: Lithuanian baigti. Baltic Linguistics 5, 81–122.
Holvoet, Axel. 2020. The Middle Voice in Baltic. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Holvoet, Axel, Marta Grzybowska & Agnieszka Rembiałkowska. 2015. Middle voice reflexives and argument structure in Baltic. In: Axel Holvoet & Nicole Nau, eds., Voice and Argument Structure in Baltic. Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 181–209.
Keenan, Edward L. & Matthew S. Dryer. 2007. Passive in the world’s languages. In: Timothy Shopen, ed., Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. 1: Clause Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 325–361.
Kemmer, Suzan. 1993. The Middle Voice. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Lekakou, Marika. 2006. Adverbial modification in middles. In: Benjamin Lyngfelt & Torgrim Solstad, eds., Demoting the Agent. Passive, Middle and Other Voice Phenomena. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 167–196.
Letučij, Aleksandr B. 2014. Meždu passivom i dekauzativom: russkie modal’nye passivy [Between passive and decausative: Russian modal passives]. In: S. Ju. Dmitrenko & N. M. Zaika, eds., Studia typologica octogenario Victori Khrakovskij Samuelis filio dedicata (= Acta Linguistica Petropolitana x.3). St Petersburg: Nauka, 365–395.
Letučij, Aleksandr B. 2016. Vozvratnost’ [Reflexivity]. In Vladimir Plungian et al., eds., Materialy k korpusnoj grammatike russkogo jazyka. Glagol. Čast’ I [Materials for a Corpus Grammar of Russian. The Verb. Part I]. Sankt-Peterburg: Nestor-Istorija, 268–340.
Marušič, Franc & Rok Žaucer. 2014. The Involuntary State/feel-like Construction: What aspect cannot do. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 22.2, 185–213.
Mitkovska, Liljana. 2019. Types of modality in South Slavic stative reflexive-dative constructions. Slověne 8.2, 260–287.
Mønnesland, Svein. 1984. The Slavonic frequentative habitual. In: Casper de Groot & Hannu Tommola, eds., Aspect Bound: A Voyage into the Realm of Germanic, Slavonic and Finno-Ugrian Aspectology, 53–76.
Næss, Åshild. 2007. Prototypical Transitivity. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Rappaport Hovav, Malka & Beth Levin. 1998. Building verb meanings. In: Miriam Butt & Wilhelm Geuder, eds., The Projection of Arguments. Lexical and Compositional Factors. 97–134. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Serdobol’skaja, N. V. & S. Ju. Toldova. 2014. Konstrukcii s ocenočnymi predikativami v russkom jazyke: učastniki situacii ocenki i semantika ocenočnogo predikata [Constructions with evaluative predicates in Russian: The participants of the evaluation event and the semantics of the evaluative predicate]. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana 10.2, 443–478.
Spencer, Andrew. 2013. Lexical Relatedness. A Paradigm-Based Model. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steinbach, Markus. 2002. Middle Voice. A Comparative Study in the Syntax-Semantics Interface of German. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Stroik, Thomas. 2006. Arguments in middles. In: Benjamin Lyngfelt & Torgrim Solstad, eds., Demoting the Agent. Passive, Middle and Other Voice Phenomena. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 301–326.
Uhlik, Mladen & Andreja Žele. 2018. Brezosebne zgradbe v slovenščini: kontrastiva z drugimi južnoslovanskimi jeziki in ruščino [Impersonal constructions in Slovenian: A comparison with other South Slavonic languages and Russian]. Jezikoslovni zapiski 24, 99–112.
Zimmerling, A. V. 2012. Nekanoničeskie podležaščie v russkom jazyke [Non-canonical subjects in Russian]. In: M. Voejkova, ed., Ot značenija k forme, ot formy k značeniju. Sbornik statej v čest’ 80-letija A. V. Bondarko. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskix kul’tur, 568–590.
Zuñiga, Fernando & Seppo Kittilä. 2019. Grammatical Voice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
