THE (NON-)CORRELATION BETWEEN MORPHOLOGICAL MARKING AND INTERPRETATION IN INCHOATIVE VERBS THAT ARE OPTIONALLY MARKED WITH REFLEXIVE MORPHOLOGY
THE (NON-)CORRELATION BETWEEN MORPHOLOGICAL MARKING AND INTERPRETATION IN INCHOATIVE VERBS THAT ARE OPTIONALLY MARKED WITH REFLEXIVE MORPHOLOGY

Summary/Abstract: According to Labelle (1992), French inchoatives can be classified into three categories on the criterion of morphological marking: (i) verbs that are obligatorily marked with reflexive morphology; (ii) verbs that lack reflexive morphology; (iii) verbs that show variants with reflexive morphology and variants without reflexive morphology. Labelle (1992) claimed that the distinction is not purely formal and identified a series of semantic properties of these verbs based on morphological marking. For instance, this author argued that the inchoatives that are marked with the reflexive pronoun se express externally caused events, while the inchoatives without se express autonomous or internally caused events. In this paper, we examine the Romanian inchoatives that are optionally marked with reflexive morphology. We show that the verbs subcategorize into verbs for which the reflexive pronoun se imposes selection restrictions, the verbs occurring with certain types of subjects, and verbs for which se does not impose selection restrictions. Our investigation of the verbs for which the reflexive pronoun se imposes selection restrictions, with special emphasis on colour verbs, reveals that while the variants without se express internally caused events, the variants with se can express internally or externally caused events (against Labelle 1992).Key words: inchoative verbs, reflexive morphology, French, Romanian, externally vs. internally caused event.

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