The lexical pragmatics of reflexive marking
Fabienne Martin, Florian Schäfer, Itamar Kastner
October 2024 

In French, a subclass of anticausative verbs is optionally marked with the clitic se, traditionally considered a reflexive marker. We show that this optionality does not consist of free variation. Rather, the presence or absence of se follows from lexical pragmatic considerations: while by default, both variants are equally acceptable, in the context of a human subject, cooperative speakers strongly prefer the variant that in certain cases avoids and in other cases maintains ambiguity with the semantically reflexive interpretation which arises in parallel with the intended (anticausative) interpretation. Understanding these preferences requires taking into account the agent bias, i.e. the tendency to interpret human nouns as agents whenever is possible, and the multifunctionality of se, which is not only used in the formation of (non-agentive) anticausative predicates, but also in (agentive) semantically reflexive ones. Depending on whether the alternative (agentive) reflexive parse is in line with shared assumptions about the event, the preference for the presence vs. absence of se is predicted. The interaction between the choice of form by the cooperative language user and individual verb subclasses is an example of what we call lexical pragmatic effects.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007069 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	resubmitted
keywords:	causative alternation, reflexive, french, limited-control change-of-state verbs, in-control change-of-state verbs, lexical pragmatics, agentivity
previous versions:	v2 [December 2023] v1 [January 2023]
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