Reflexives and Reciprocals in Kavalan
Date Issued
2005
Date
2005
Author(s)
Shen, Chia-chi
DOI
en-US
Abstract
This study investigates two types of anaphoric expression in Kavalan. The first one is reflexives. Kavalan does not have a unique reflexive marker. It employs personal pronouns and izip ‘body’ to express reflexives. While the use of personal pronouns may cause ambiguity between a pronominal interpretation and a reflexive interpretation, the use of izip ‘body’ does not have this problem. In fact, the combination of izip and a genitive pronoun resembles a true reflexive anaphor in several aspects, including that it is bound to a local antecedent.
In terms of the binding of reflexives, it is found that Chomsky’s (1981) binding conditions, which describe the distribution of anaphors, cause difficulties in delimiting the reflexives in Kavalan. On the other hand, Reinhart and Reuland (1993) consider reflexivity as a property of predicates. By examining the relation between the syntactic form and the semantic content of reflexive predicates, Reinhart and Reuland’s (1993) revised binding conditions can better account for the issues related to reflexives of Kavalan. In addition, it is also found that Kavalan reflexive binding is sensitive to argument structure, instead of grammatical relation. Therefore, a reflexive anaphor can appear as a thematic object, but not a thematic subject, regardless of whether the predicate is AF or NAF.
The second type of anaphoric expression is reciprocals. In Kavalan reciprocals are mainly marked on the verbs by an affix sim-. In addition to marking reciprocals, the same affix is also used to mark chaining, collective and distributive situations, which all share a semantic property – plurality of relations among participants. This semantic property is also reflected on the syntax. The sim-marked constructions all require plural subjects.
While several studies concerning reciprocals of other languages conclude that the constructions derived by reciprocal affixes in these languages are intransitive (e.g., Gerdts 2000, Mchombo 1993, McGregor 2000, etc.), I have found that the same conclusion cannot be made for Kavalan. Although transitive verbs indeed become intransitive after the reciprocal affix sim- is attached, ditransitive verbs become transitive instead of intransitive after undergoing the same process. Therefore, I conclude that the reciprocal affix sim- in Kavalan is a valence-changing affix, i.e., it reduces the number of arguments, but it does not necessarily derive intransitive verbs.
Subjects
反身詞
交互句型
約束理論
代詞
南島語
噶瑪蘭
reflexive
reciprocal
binding
anaphor
Austronesian
Kavalan
Type
other
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