2007): The Limits of Deponency: A Chukotko-Centric Perspective

• Main Author: Jonathan David Bobaljik
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: in (1; Chukchi
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.694.5786; http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/deponency.pdf

Abstract. This paper investigates the question of whether there should be a general theory of (voice-related) deponency, in the sense of a common analysis to deponent patterns across languages. The main empirical focus here is the “spurious antipassive” (SAP) of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages. The hallmark of this construction is non-active, intransitive morphology on the verb, in an active, transitive morphosyntactic environment, satisfying the central criteria for characterization as a deponency mismatch. Consideration of a detailed theoretical analysis of the spurious antipassive (Bobaljik and Branigan 2006) suggests a negative answer to the research question. It is possible to derive many properties of the spurious antipassive from the interaction of independently motivated aspects of the theory of syntax with independently observed language-particular properties of Chukchi. However, the analysis in question suggests that at a formal level, the Chukchi construction bears a greater affinity to, for example, the Basque ergative displacement than it does to classical examples of deponency in Latin and Greek. While deponent patterns provide challenging windows into the range of possible morpho-syntactic mismatches, deponency as a descriptive term—even when restricted to examples of voice mismatches—does not necessarily denote a natural class of phenomena.