11th Annual Workshop on American Indigenous Languages
May 23-24, 2008
2008 Plenary Speaker:
Keren Rice
University of Toronto and Swarthmore College
What's in a Middle?
Athapaskan languages are known for their use of middle marking; see, for instance, Arce-Aranales, Axelrod, and Fox 1994, Axelrod 1998, Berez 2006, Kibrik 1996, Rice 2000a, b, Thompson 1989, 1996. In this paper I examine the range of uses of middle marking based on the outstanding Athapaskan dictionaries, propose a core meaning for the middle marker, and raise a number of questions raised by the middle construction.
Middle marking is used in a variety of constructions in Athapaskan languages including reflexives, reciprocals, self-benefactives, incorporated body parts, and intransitive iteratives. These represent prototypical middles, as identified in the literature by Kemmer 1993 and others. In Athapaskan languages with incorporated nouns, there are additional constructions that take middle marking. These include body part incorporates with both transitive and intransitive verbs; these are similar to reflexives.
In addition, there are other constructions in which middle marking regularly occurs in some Athapaskan languages. It is found in the so-called errative construction (doing an activity referred to by the verb excessively or incorrectly and being unable to stop or escape from the consequences), in the perambulative construction (Verb around), and in the activity incorporate construction (do X while Y-ing). It also occurs with a construction that is identified as spontaneous middle/anticausative/passive. The activity incorporate construction is of interest, as this use appears to be typologically unusual.
What do these constructions share? Middle marking is used when two elements are present that refer to one. These elements may be entities, as with the reflexive, reciprocal, self-benefactive, and body part incorporate constructions, where two entities map onto one. The elements may be locations, as in intransitive iteratives, where the source and goal are identical. The shared elements may be events, as in the errative and perambulative constructions, where the event specified by the verb is repeated. With activity incorporates, the activities involve the same subject and occur at the same time.
The use of middle voice marking in these languages has interesting implications and raises many questions, and I pose some of these questions here. Middle marking is often argued to indicate low elaboration; it is sometimes thought to involve agent suppression or lowered control on the part of the agent. How does the middle marking illustrated by these languages fit these descriptions? The conditions under which middle marking is found in these languages suggest that it is not best identified as argument decreasing in a syntactic sense, given that it is used in constructions involving events as well as constructions involving entities, but does it involve agent suppression? What kind of syntactic change, if any, does it involve? As noted above, middle marking is also used in spontaneous middles/anticausatives/passives. Is a uniform analysis of the range of environments in which middle marking is used possible: is there a unified account that involves the mapping of distinct entities or events onto one together with the spontaneous middles? Finally, what are the formal structures – morphological, semantic, syntactic, associated with middle marking? I address these issues.
While many of the uses of the middle that are found in Athapaskan languages are common to other languages, the use of middle marking with activity incorporates is not reported elsewhere to my knowledge, and provides insight into the conceptual grounding of middle marking.
About WAIL
The annual Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL) at the University of California, Santa Barbara is presented by the Native American Indian Languages study group (NAIL), which has been meeting regularly in Santa Barbara since 1990 to discuss issues relating to Native American language and culture. The workshop is a forum for the discussion of theoretical and descriptive linguistic studies of indigenous languages of the Americas. WAIL is also sponsored by the UCSB Linguistics Department.
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