Grammatikseminarium: Viviana Masia (Roma Tre University), Autonomous verbs, passives and stativization in Irish: a semantic-pragmatic perspective

This talk will outline the properties of two common classes of verbs in Irish, the autonomous verb and the verbal noun, and will discuss their relation to passive structures, on the one hand, and to stativization processes, on the other.

Autonomous verbs are non-agreeing verb forms generally appearing in subjectless sentences like (1).

1. Óltar           fíon     in  Éirinn

       Drink.AUT   wine   in   Ireland

      “Wine is drunk in Ireland”

Within Celtic linguistics they have sometimes been associated to passivization strategies (Blevins 2003), although they differ from canonical passives for at least three orders of reasons: firstly, autonomous verbs have an active diathesis; secondly, they do not involve the promotion of the patient to subject function; thirdly, they do not allow the overt mention of the agent, irrespective of its distribution in the sentence. In written Irish, sentences with autonomous verbs are often used whenever the writer does not intend to provide information about who initiated a given process. If, on the contrary, the agent is meant to be focused, an agentive passive like (2) is more commonly used.

2. Tá              vása                 á bhriseadh     ag  Jane

       Be.AUX    vase.INDEF        break.VN         at   Jane

       “A vase will be broken by Jane”

Moving from this assumption, what autonomous sentences seem to do is to take on the function of deagentive passives such as The vase was broken, The ball was kicked, or the like. 

Based on a small-scale corpus of news texts in Irish Gaelic (mostly taken from RTé archives) and, notably, looking at both the activation state of expressed and unexpressed agents in autonomous and agentive passive sentences, the hypothesis is put forth that the two structure types are in complementary distribution, in that, while autonomous sentences seem to be preferably used when the agent is unfocused, agentive passives are instead a strategy to focus the agent and topicalize the patient (Siewierska 1984; Masia 2024). The two structure types thus seem to constitute a pragmatically motivated minimal pair (Masia under review).

Verbal nouns are another common verb class in Irish and are generally regarded as paralleling other non-finite forms in European languages (Jeffers 1978; Stenson 2008), although they display formal and syntactic properties that characterize them in a particular way. In fact, unlike Romance or Germanic non-finite forms, Irish verbal nouns more flexibly admit pluralization as well as other canonical functions and distributions of typical nouns (Bloch-Trojnar 2006). In Irish, they are also used in certain passive structures, particularly in progressive and prospective passives, respectively denoting ongoing and future events (Nolan 2012).

As shown in (3), these passives are constructed with a non-canonical surface realization of the demoted agent, which is typically preceded by a locative preposition (ag ‘at’).

(3)Tá             an      liathróid      á ciceáil        ag     an     imreoir

          Be.AUX       DET   ball                kick.VN         at    DET    player

        “The ball is being kicked by the player”

This pattern, added to the presence of a nominalized verb form (á ciceáil ‘kick’), endows the passive with an underlying semantic structure resembling that of other stative events such as ‘I’m happy’, ‘I’m sorry’, ‘I’m afraid of the dark’, ‘I’m sick’, ‘I know the story’, typically surfacing as locative constructions in Irish (e.g. “Is sadness on me for…”, “Is the knowledge on me of….”, etc.). In such construction types, the Experiencer is rather construed as the possessor of the condition or state being described. In the same way, verbal nouns in progressive and prospective passives bring about nominalizations that “reify” the main event thus presenting it as an abstract object virtually possessed by the agent. In other words, the deep logico-semantic interpretation of a passive like (3) would be “The act of kicking a ball is at the player”, in which the agent allows being construed as the possessor of the objectified event.

Following a distinction put forth by Lazard (1994), it is suggested that Irish passives comply with the syntactic pattern of what he calls Minor Biactant Constructions (MiBC), namely sentence types that are characterized by non-canonical (agent-)subject marking and by an overall stative encoding of the event. Therefore, passives in Irish entail a stativization process – in that they endow an event with a semantically locative interpretation - and verbal nouns constitute a word class that is precisely dedicated to allowing this type of coding. 

References

Blevins, James P. 2003. Passives and impersonals. Journal of Linguistics. 39(3): 473-520. 

Bloch-Trojnar, Maria. (2006). Polyfunctionality in Morphology: A Study of Verbal Nouns in Modern Irish. KUL: Wydaw.

Nolan, Brian. (2012). The Structure of Modern Irish. Dublin: Equinox.

Jeffers, Robert J. (1978). Old Irish Verbal Nouns. Ériu 29, 1-12.

Lazard, Gilbert. (1994). L’actance. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Stenson, Nancy. (2008). Intermediate Irish. London: Routledge.

Masia, Viviana. 2024. Irish autonomous verbs in a semantic-pragmatic interface. Some reflections on information structure-driven valency selection. Linguistik Online 127 3/24, 83-106.

Masia, Viviana. (under review). Passive and autonomous in Irish. A pragmatically motivated minimal pair?