Thoughts on Reflexives and Passives

March 27, 2010

Thoughts on Reflexives and Passives

There is another reflexive in Russian, of course; it is the pronoun себя (gen.-acc), себе (dat.-prep.) собой (instr.); the nominative is lacking. This is the Slavic cognate of Latin sui (gen.), sibi (dat.) se(se) (acc.). This form is in complementary distribution with -ся — where the one occurs the other may not.

I do not understand all the reasons underlying the choice in Russian. We say я видел себя в зеркале, я люблю себя ‘I saw myself in the mirror, I love myself’; я *любился does not exist, as so linguists star it as impossible, but, я влюбился в Аню ‘I fell in love with Anya’ is a standard locution.

If we said я *виделся it would be unacceptable, but мы часто виделись ‘we often saw each other’ is very common, cf. мы встретились утром на улице ‘we met in the morning on the street’. This is the ‘reciprocal’ reflexive, when both agents combine in a single action, or two or more people join in producing a single action.

Переписываться ‘correspond’, is often sited as a reciprocal of actions going back and forth, action A producing re-action B as in a tennis game. My favorite formation of this sort is перестукиваться ‘communicate by knocking (on metal pipes, for example, in prison). This is quasi-productive and you can try to make up your own examples and see if they exist. Перемигиваться ‘to exchange winks’, перекашливаться ‘to exchange meaningful coughs’.I think this would be a good construction for many semiotic systems, say animal communication.

A very interesting verb is считать кого кем shorthand for ‘consider someone (acc) someone (instr.). This is a ‘small clause’ verb, or a verb with double complement, object accusative and comparative entity, instrumental. It can take an animate (human, personal) subject and passivizes in -ся, so that it is a glaring exception to the rule that passives with the particle have to be inanimate. Not only that: it can take the full reflexive pronoun, with the true reflexive meaning. What a dream come true. Here are examples:

(1а ) Профессор считает Mашу (acc) хорошей студенткой (a good student) ‘the professor considers Masha an excellent student’
(1б) Мы все считаем mашу хорошей студенткой ‘We all consider Masha a good student’
(1в) Mаша (всеми) считается хорошей студенткой ‘Masha is considered a good student by everyone’
(1г) Mаша считает себя очень хорошей студенткой ‘Masha considers herself a very good student’.

Example 1a and 1б are transitive, with instr. complement. Example 1в is passive, with the agent in the instrumental (всеми) and the complement in the instrumental. Note that the two instrumental phrases are separated so that they don’t get mixed up. 1г is the reflexive, with the full reflexive pronoun in the accusative, and ‘good student’ in the instrumental as complement.

Why, I ask you, can’t all the passives/reflexives in Russian be this straightforward? (Again, see Townsend, Chapter X.) But they are not. Townsend mentions some formations with -ся which might be confused by students as reflexives or passives: Иван убился means neither ‘Ivan killed himself’ nor ‘Ivan was killed’. but ‘Ivan got smashed up to death’. But повеситься, утопиться do have the reflexive meaning, ‘to hang oneself’ and ‘to drown oneself’. What can one do?

The lesson is that general rules must be built up slowly, with numerous lexical exceptions. Себя always has some sort of ‘self’ reference, that is, it is always reflexive, while –ся only has one meaning for absolute sure in all cases, the syntactic one that it can’t be transitive, it can’t take an accusative (but can denote various sorts of other things).

More later,
gmc