Marcación media en español: afección, control y sujetos no canónicos

Abstract

Abstract Middle markers (such as reflexives in Spanish) are used to encode both semantically connected situations and some semantic properties of the subject participants. Previous literature on the topic usually mentioned two of these properties: affectedness (Klaiman 1988 and 1991; Kemmer 1993; Maldonado 1999; Zúñiga/Kittilä 2019) and control (potential control, Klaiman 1991; non-canonical control, Kaufmann 2007). Middle marking in Spanish has been also related to both affected/patient subjects (García-Miguel 1985; Mendikoetxea 1999; Jiménez Juliá 2016) and agentive/intentional subjects (Martín Zorraquino 1979; Morimoto 2011; Di Tullio 2012). Nevertheless, there is not a comprehensive study on affectedness, control and middle marking in Spanish. This paper seeks to shade some light on the topic offering a detailed analysis of affectedness, control, and their correlations within a verbal sample from 13 semantic classes of the middle domain. In particular, we claim that middle marking changes the status of the subject entity, which can be [+affected], [+control], or [-control] depending on the semantics of the verb, the semantics of the sentence, the status of the entity in the active voice, and on our world knowledge. Lastly, we argue that the general function of middle marking is to encode non-canonical subjects on the control construct.