Reflexives and Passives

March 25, 2010

Reflexives, Leading into Passives

Marmeladov asks Raskolnikov, in the stinking bar at a sticky little table, “My dear sir, may I inquire, are you in the service (изволили служить) or are you a student (учитесь)?” — Учусь, the latter replies, using a verb well known to 102 students to mean “I am enrolled in a course of study, I study.” You also know that when the ‘reflexive particle’ is removed, the verb is transitive: (вы)учить слова, урок. But what does the particle -ся mean, and how is it reflexive? And how many verbs are like this, that they may be used with or without the reflexive particle?

In the strict sense phrases like ‘wash (oneself)’, ‘shave (oneself)’ ‘comb one’s hair’ — мыться, бриться, причесаться are reflexive as the action is directed by the subject to himself, and transitive when used with an accusative, as in мыть машину. (The reflexive is what Chomsky calls anaphora, one of the keys to a child’s setting of linguistic parameters, supposedly, as she learns that ‘Mary sees her in the mirror’ means not Mary, and ‘Mary sees herself in the mirror’ is no one but Mary. This has a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland flavor to it,) But verbs in -ся have a large semantic range, well beyond reflexivization. The only thing they all share has been said to be intransitivity, that is, none of them appear with an object in the accusative. So: ‘study the Russian language’ is учиться русскому языку, with the dative, ‘fear lions’, бояться львов, with the genitive. This is said to be so as the particle is a trace of an accusative meaning ‘self’, as in защититься от врага ‘to defend oneself from the enemy’. In some Slavic languages, such as Czech, reflexives that semantically ‘feel like’ transitives have developed accusatives, especially in the spoken language: učím se ruštinu ‘I am learning Russian’, with the reflexive se and the accusative (fem.) noun rustinu.

Is the particle ever part of a passive construction? Yes, indeed it is, but there are some important semantic and grammatical restrictions. First the subject may not be an animate, or especially a human animate being. Second, the verb must be imperfective.
So we do indeed have passives such as: Набоков говорил, что роман Дар писался во время войны “Nabokov said that the novel The Gift was written during the war.” This sentence is an elegant way of not mentioning himself, the agent. What if it were perfective, e.g., how would Nabokov say the the novel was completed (by him) during the war? Набоков говорил, что роман Дар был закончен/написан (им) во время войны. This structure can be unwieldy and about as elegant as ‘the ball was hit by Nabokov’. Russian can avoid these structures, those with a passive participle, an auxiliary, and an agent in the instrumental, by avoiding the perfective and describing the event as unfolding and imperfective.

With an inanimate subject and an imperfective predicate, we find lots of passives, such as дом строится нашей фирмой ‘the building is being constructed by our firm’.
A verb like возвращать(ся) ‘to return’ can be ‘go back’ when reflexive, and “take X (acc) back’ when not reflexive. We have: студенты возвращают книги в библиотеку ‘the students are returning the books to the library’, студенты возвращаются в библиотеку ‘the students are returning (i.e. going back) to the library’. We may think of the reflexive particle in the latter as bearing a reflexive, accusative meaning: ‘the students are returning-selves’.

What about книги возврaщаются в библиотеку? This can’t mean that the books are going back on their own steam; it must imply an agent. We could add студентами to this sentence and we would get a reasonably grammatical, although far-fetched sounding, sentence, meaning something ‘the books are being returned to the library by the students’. Passives like this, with the agent overtly supplied, always have struck me as awkward, just like ‘the book was completed by Nabokov during the war’. (See Townsend’s Continuing with Russian, Chapter X for his discussion.)

One linguist said that ‘Hubert loves God’ is good English, but ‘God is loved by Hubert’, the passive thereof, is fishy. Why do you think this is so? But it all depends. The past passive participle alone doesn’t sound awkard, and look what Majakovsky did with the form убит ‘killed’ — Убиты! / И все равно мне / он или я их / убил. ‘They have been killed/they are killed / and I don’t care / Whether it was he or I / who killed them.' Cf. also Lermontov’s great elegy on the death of Pushkin: Убит поэт, невольник чести ‘The poet has been killed, captive of his honor’. Look how the Russian ppp short form can contain an entire passive sentence within it: сказано, сделано ‘it is said, it is done’ (‘no sooner said than done’).

Turn to poetry to resolve and transcend the sophistries of grammar.

More on passives and reflexives will follow. This is a big subject that has always attracted the attention of Slavists.

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