Reflexives in the VALLEX Lexicon: Syntactic Reflexivity and Reciprocity

Published: 31 Oct 2021, Last Modified: 18 Mar 2024PBMLEveryoneCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Reflexives, encoding a variety of meanings, pose a great challenge for both theoretical and lexicographic description. As they are associated with changes in morphosyntactic properties of verbs, their description is highly relevant for verb valency. In Czech, reflexives function as the reflexive personal pronoun and as verbal affixes. In this paper, we address those language phenomena that are encoded by the reflexive personal pronoun, i.e., reflexivity and reciprocity. We introduce the lexicographic representation of these two language phenomena in the VALLEX lexicon, a valency lexicon of Czech verbs, accounting for the role of the reflexives with respect to the valency structure of verbs. This representation makes use of the division of the lexicon into a data component and a grammar component. It takes into account that reflexivity and reciprocity are conditioned by the semantic properties of verbs on the one hand and that morphosyntactic changes brought about by these phenomena are systemic on the other. About one third of the lexical units contained in the data component of the lexicon are assigned the information on reflexivity and/or reciprocity in the form of pairs of the affected valency complementations (2,039 on reflexivity and 2,744 on reciprocity). A set of rules is formulated in the grammar component (3 rules for reflexivity and 18 rules for reciprocity). These rules derive the valency frames underlying syntactically reflexive and reciprocal constructions from the valency frames describing non-reflexive and non-reciprocal constructions. Finally, the proposed representation makes it possible to determine which lexical units of verbs create ambiguous constructions that can be interpreted either as reflexive or as reciprocal.
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