These are some of the projects that I have been working on over the years.

Project description

The middle voice is a complex linguistic domain, as it lies at the interface between morphosyntax and the structure of the lexicon. A typical example of a middle marking language is Italian, in which the ‘reflexive’ pronoun si in fact behaves as a middle marker, as it is used either lexically with verbs that only occur with the reflexive, e.g. arrabbiarsi 'get angry', or to derive reflexives from transitive verbs, e.g. colpirsi ‘hit oneself’ from colpire ‘hit’. Typological research has shown that such systems occur in many languages of the world, and they show striking similarities. Despite existing typological work, we know little about how these systems originate and develop over time. In this project, I provide the first ever diachronic typology of the middle voice, in order to understand the possible sources and processes that lead to the rise of middle markers, why some processes are more frequent than others, and what the development of the middle voice reveals about the dynamic lexicon-morphosyntax interface. To tackle these questions, I combine a survey of a sample of 149 languages with the in-depth analysis of a number of case-studies. The results of the project will not only improve our knowledge of the nature of middle voice systems, but also contribute to refining methodologies and theoretical tenets of current approaches to diachronic typology.

Events

Together with Andrea Sansò, I have organized a workshop on the diachronic typology of middle voice systems at the 2020 online SLE Conference. Check here for more info and access to the prerecorded talks! Some of the presentations have been published in a special issue of STUF.

Language sample 

The dataset gathered during the project can be found here.