ON THE NON-REFLEXIVE MEANING OF INCHOATIVE VERBS
ON THE NON-REFLEXIVE MEANING OF INCHOATIVE VERBS

Summary/Abstract: In Romance languages, unaccusative verbs generally take part in the causative-inchoative alternation, exhibit reflexive morphology and can license phrases carrying the meaning “by itself”. Some of these features are shared with reflexive verbs giving rise to reflexive analyses of inchoatives, such as Chierchia (2004) or Koontz-Garboden (2009). However, despite the apparent similarity between reflexives and inchoatives, the two verb types differ in terms of semantics: Reflexive verbs display genuine semantic reflexivity in which agent subjects are actively involved in the process, whereas inchoative verbs are assigned a weak semantic reflexivity where properties of the argument cause the event (Chierchia 2004). In this article, we will show that the formal resemblance between reflexives and inchoatives does not warrant a weak semantic reflexivity of inchoatives. Thus, arguments underlying reflexive analyses, such as the licensing of “by itself” and the meaning of inchoatives, will turn out to be inconclusive in our study. First, we focus on the licensing and meaning of “by itself” in inchoative contexts, and we show that inchoatives do not pattern with reflexives. Second, we investigate the meaning of inchoative verbs in the absence of “by itself”, seeking to establish if semantic reflexivity is tenable for these verbs. In our survey, the 33 Romanian speakers that we consulted dismiss even a weak reflexive analysis of inchoatives in which properties of the subject argument are responsible for the change of state event.

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