engleski

The Confluence of the Dative and Middle Voice in Croatian and Polish

This paper deals with various constructions with the reflexive marker se/się involving a noun in the dative case. We discuss the way in which the se/się construction interacts with the dative case in the construction of meaning. A corpus study was conducted on the IPI PAN corpus of Polish (http://korpus.pl/) and the Croatian National Corpus (http://www.hnk.ffzg.hr). The results show that there are two basic semantic groups: the allative/competitor group and the transfer group, which partially corresponds to semantic groups found for various dative senses (Stanojević and Tuđman in press). In the allative/competitor group the dative serves as an abstract goal, and the se/się construction marks the self-movement of the agent (i.e. the fact that it has internal energy). In various transfer subsenses the se/się construction is grammaticalized to defocus the agent, and the dative gradually changes its role from a potentially affected recipient. In such senses both the dative and the se/się construction are grammaticalized in respect to their other senses, and are hence semantically bleached. Therefore, in those senses new constructional meaning occurs, which is not present in any senses of the two components taken alone: dative as the experiencer of its internal change of state. Constructional meaning is possible only in the bleached senses, which are less detailed in respect to the “ basic” , diachronically older senses.

dative; middle voice; Croatian; Polish

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