## Passive and Antipassive in a Functional Description of French Reflexive Verbs

## 0. Functional Principles

Writing a grammar, or just doing grammatical description, presupposes some kind of guiding principle. The guiding principle of most traditional reference grammars of the standard European languages has been the classification offered by the traditional parts of speech or word classes: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, prepositions ... The architecture of the work seems almost to follow automatically from such a list.

One  guiding  principle  -  among  several  -  of  our  work  on  French which emerges as more and more forceful is the idea of cross-linguistic functional  categories ,  i.e.  the  common  functional  content  of  structurally often quite diverse constructions of different languages. Now, for one thing, French does not have a passive in the same sense as Latin does, i.e. a morphologically anchored grammatical process. Yet, the resemblances  between  Latin  and  French  passives  are  simply  too  persuasive to be ignored. And by looking for common functional content, in spite of structural differences - resemblances are not at all rare either! - one is often lead to classify the material in ways different from the tradition and to identify patterns not previously recognised as grammatical  patterns,  and  sometimes  even  to  solve  traditional  puzzles  and paradoxes. This kind of 'squinting grammar' - to use Jespersen's term - can be quite fruitful and lead to genuine insights, hopefully not only in the grammarian's mind. This I hope to demonstrate by the example of reflexive constructions in French, which group neatly as passives and antipassives. An analysis which would never have been possible without a good deal of squinting: what grammarian working only on the major European languages has ever heard of the antipassive?

* Michael Herslund Handelshøjskolen i København Dalgas Have 15 DK-2000  Frederiksberg

The danger of the approach is of course that the straight-jacket of Latin grammar is replaced by an unprincipled promiscuity of all kinds of categories from the grammars of exotic languages. But this danger should be constrained by two principles. First, by the requirement of the existence of a functional category, i.e. the already mentioned common functional content of different grammatical structures. Secondly, by the awareness that the grammaticalisation of structural patterns occurs in different degrees in different languages: what is e.g. a genuine grammatical process (i.e. an obligatory choice) in one language, may only be an option  found  with  a  handful  of  lexemes  in  the  next,  even  an  option which exhibits only scant superficial internal unity.

Anyway, I think there is a good chance of making sense out of the idea of cross-linguistic functional categories. Such categories could for instance be the ways in which different languages proceed to get rid of Agent- and Patient-arguments under certain pragmatic or textual circumstances.  These  procedures  are,  however  great  the  structural  differences from language to language, good candidates for the status of cross-linguistic functional categories. And they are well-known in most languages,  the  second  however  mostly  in  exotic  languages:  they  are called respectively PASSIVE and ANTIPASSIVE.

## 1. Voice Alternations

## 1.1. Passive

The category of voice is constituted by a systematic variation in the pairing of semantic rôles (SR) with grammatical relations (GR). The standard transitive construction looks like this:

<!-- formula-not-decoded -->

In such a two participant clause, one participant can be highlighted by marginalising or removing the other. By the marginalisation of a participant is meant the process by which it is so to speak pushed into the peripheral part of the clause by not being linked to - or by losing - one of the central GRs, subject or object. It is instead, if expressed at all, expressed as an oblique or a circumstantial phrase.

This is what typically happens in the passive: the Agent is demoted, i.e. removed or marginalised and realised as a circumstantial. Since the clause needs a subject, the Patient is consequently promoted and takes over the subject relation:

- (2) Passive:

Patient ◊ Subject

V ◊

Agent ◊ Ø/Circumstantial

V

By the Patient's usurpation of the subject relation, there is no object relation left in the clause and the resulting structure is an intransitive construction. The passive is, as is well known, realised as a predicative construction  in  French  (cf.  Sørensen  1986),  which  has  been  fully grammaticalised in the sense that it occurs with almost all transitive verbs 1 :

- (3) Julie a ouvert la fenêtre.
2. 'Julie opened the window'

La fenêtre a été ouverte (par Julie).

'The window was opened (by Julie)'

But the same, or at least a very similar, content can be expressed by a reflexive construction. One important difference is however, that the Agent is obligatorily suppressed in that case:

- (4) La fenêtre s'est ouverte Ø . 'The window (was) opened'

This construction is semi-grammaticalised: many, but not all, transitive verbs allow it.

## 1.2. Antipassive

The less well-known antipassive voice - which until recently has only been  recognised  in  ergative  languages  -  is  the  mirror  image  of  the passive, because what it does is to remove or marginalise the Patient, thereby concentrating the content of the clause on the Agent:

- (5) Antipassive:

Agent ◊ Subject

V ◊ V

Patient ◊ Ø/Oblique

1 For some exceptions, see Leclère (1993).

Most of the general content of the antipassive follows from this concentration upon the Agent by the demotion of the Patient. Instead of stating that the Agent performs an action directed towards a Patient, it is  stated  that  the  Agent  is  involved  in  an  activity  which  is  or  isn't relative to a Patient, but this Patient is not integrated into the verbal situation in any central rôle: it has no central GR. It is the Agent and its willful and intentional activity, sometimes in vain, which is highlighted. The different more specific shades of meaning often associated with the antipassive thus follow from the demotion of the Patient (cf. especially Bittner 1987, Cooreman 1994): the Patient is unimportant because it is non-specific  or  unidentifiable,  or  it  is  obvious,  therefore  often  not mentioned  at  all  in  the  antipassive;  if  expressed,  it  is  seen  as  only partially  affected  by  the  Agent's  activity,  or  not  affected  at  all,  the Agent's  activity  being  an  attempted  or  fruitless,  even  imaginary, activity; the action intended by the Agent is represented as not carried through to its conclusion, and so on.

The antipassive  can  be  illustrated  by  the  following  example  from West Greenlandic (Bittner 1987:195):

- (6) a. Jaaku p illu sana vaa . Jacob-E house(A) be.building-tr.indic-3sgE/3sgA 'Jacob is/was building house'
- b. Jaaku      illu mik sana vuq . Jacob(A) house-INS be.building-ap-intr.indic-3sgA 'Jacob is/was building house'

The  crucial  differences  between  the  transitive  and  the  antipassive versions are the following: in a., the Agent is ergatively marked, in b. it is in the absolutive; in a. the Patient is in the absolutive, in b. in the instrumental. And most importantly, in a., the verb is inflected transitively  and  agrees  with  both  participants,  whereas  in  b.  it  is  inflected intransitively (with a Ø  antipassive affix, according to Bittner's analysis) and agrees only with one participant, the Agent in the absolutive.

One  can  make  a  case  for  the  view  that  the  alternation  between transitive and prepositional constructions of verbs in Danish is a case of antipassive too, the more so since certain verbs in the prepositional (= antipassive) construction are inflected intransitively, i.e. with auxiliary være 'be' instead of the transitive have 'have', cf. Durst-Andersen & Herslund (1996). And the Greenlandic examples translate neatly into Danish transitive and prepositional respectively:

- (6') a. Jakob byggede et hus.
- b. Jakob byggede på et hus.

The  difference  between  these  two  is  clearly  in  accordance  with  the notional characterisation of the antipassive above. The alternation is not however, as is the case in West Greenlandic, fully grammaticalised, although widespread and apparently gaining ground. But this equation with the antipassive has given many important clues to the interpretation of the prepositional construction of Danish transitive verbs.

## 2. Antipassive in French

Different  alternations  between  transitive  and  prepositional  constructions in French resemble, although on a much smaller scale, what is found in Danish. One finds alternations like the following (cf. Boons et al. 1976:270 ff., Herslund Forthcoming ):

- (7) Elle a touché le radiateur.

Elle a touché au radiateur.

'She touched (Prep) the radiator'

Elle a goûté les fraises.

Elle a goûté aux fraises.

'She tasted (Prep) the strawberries'

Julie et Jean discutent l'avenir.

Julie et Jean discutent de l'avenir.

'Julie and Jean discuss (Prep) the future'

- Jean fouille le tiroir.
- Jean fouille dans le tiroir.
- 'Jean searches (Prep) the drawer'
- Julie cherche ses lunettes.
- Julie cherche après ses lunettes.

'Julie is searching (Prep) her glasses'

Such  alternations  are  lexically  determined  and  not  systematic  grammatical choices, but they also exhibit the typical antipassive features: the  marginalisation  of  the  Patient  and  the  loss  of  the  object  relation whereby the clause concentrates on the Agent. As mentioned above, the antipassive clause states that the Agent is involved in an activity which may be relative to a Patient, but this Patient is not integrated into the verbal  situation  with  a  central  GR.  It  is  the  Agent's  willful  and intentional activity which is highlighted. This is also what traditional grammars  say  about  pairs  such  as  (7),  to  the  extent  that  they  say anything about them at all (but see Gougenheim 1970).

## 3. Antipassive and Reflexive

The crucial feature of the antipassive is thus the demotion of the Patient and hence the suppression of the object relation, the consequence of which is the creation of an intransitive clause. Another obvious way of getting rid of a Patient is to identify it with the Agent. Certain languages use accordingly their antipassive to express reflexivity (cf. Foley & Van Valin  1985:339  f.,  Cooreman  1994:83,  Palmer  1994:185,  Lazard 1994:239).  And  similar  facts  are  found  in  Danish  where  the  aforementioned  prepositional  (antipassive)  construction  is  used  when  the verbs are used reflexively:

- (8) forstå ngt -

forstå sig på ngt

'understand smth -

understand Refl Prep smth'

benytte ngt -

benytte sig af ngt

'use smth -

use Refl Prep smth'

forberede ngt -

forberede sig på ngt

'prepare smth -

prepare Refl Prep smth'

beslutte ngt

-

beslutte sig til ngt

'decide smth

- decide Refl Prep smth'

So it could be possible that the insight afforded by the antipassive as a cross-linguistic functional category could be exploited in analysing the French  reflexives  too  (cf.  Lazard  1994:255,  Herslund  1996),  where expressions  with  a  similar  functional  content,  i.e.  Agent  perspective and enhanced intentional value, are found:

- (9) Elle a décidé de partir.

'She decided to leave'

Elle s'est décidée à partir.

'She decided Refl Prep to leave'

Le ministre a tu ce problème.

'The minister kept secret this problem'

Le ministre s'est tu sur ce problème.

'The minister Refl was silent Prep this problem'

Le ministre a attaqué ce problème.

'The minister attacked this problem'

Le ministre s'est attaqué à ce problème.

'The minister Refl attacked Prep this problem'

And here we approach something which looks like a grammaticalised antipassive in French.

## 4. French Reflexives

Within certain limits of variation most descriptions of French reflexive constructions  reckon  with  5  types  of  reflexives  (cf.  Stéfanini  1971, Ruwet 1972, Boons et al. 1976):

## 1. Ordinary reflexive:

- (10)
- Les enfants se lavent. 'The children wash (themselves)'

## 2. Reciprocal reflexive:

- (11) Pierre et Marie se chatouillent.

'Pierre and Marie tickle each other'

## 3. Lexicalised reflexive:

- (12) Pierre s'est évanoui.

'Pierre fainted'

## 4. Medio-passive reflexive:

- (13)
- Le pont-levis s'est abaissé (de lui-même, tout seul). 'The drawbridge lowered (by itself)'

## 5. Passive reflexive:

- (14) Les cuisses de grenouilles se mangent avec les doigts.

'Frogs' legs are eaten with the fingers'

Apart  from  the  fact  that  different  descriptions  have  partly  diverging classifications and labels for the different types 2 , the classification con- ceals two major problems. The first problem is that such a classification tends  to  destroy  the  unity  of  reflexivity  and  to  make  believe  that reflexive constructions can be made to mean almost anything; the very unity  of  the se -constructions  vanishes,  which  is  sought  remedied  by treating the entire field of se -constructions as an exponent of the middle voice  (Stéfanini  1971).  But  the  violation  of  the  'one  form  -  one function'  principle  remains,  because  the  different  uses  really  do  not have  much  in  common.  The  second  problem  is  that  without  really looking very far, one finds many examples which do not fit into any of the  five  classes.  To  take  but  one  example  of  this,  the  verb tromper 'cheat' has a reflexive use, as in (15) b.:

2 There is in fact a good deal of terminological and classificatory confusion in this field, especially with regard to the two last mentioned constructions: 4. is called 'neutre' by Ruwet (1972) and Boons et al. (1976), 5. is called 'moyen' by Ruwet (1972), but 'à

- (15) a. Jean trompe Marie. 'Jean cheats Marie'
2. b.
3. Jean se trompe. 'Jean Refl cheats' (i.e 'Jean is wrong')

which could be seen as the reflexive counterpart of the transitive clause in a. But this analysis seems to be ruled out by the different properties of  the  transitive  and  the  reflexive  clauses,  as  in  c.  and  d.  (cf.  Gross 1968:31):

- (15) c. Jean se trompe de chapeau. 'Jean gets the wrong hat'
- d. * Jean trompe Marie de chapeau.

So  the  reflexive  c.  cannot  simply  be  derived  from  the  transitive  d., which  is  however  the  fundamental  tenure  of  the  current  analysis  of ordinary  reflexives,  i.e.  they  are  variants  of  transitive  clauses  where subject and object happen to be identical.

One way of solving such problems is to start all over and look for functional categories which might yield a better understanding of the reflexive field. One thing that all reflexive clauses have in common is that  they  are  intransitive,  and  as  intransitive  you  can  possibly  get  in French: they all inflect with the auxiliary être . Now, we saw above that the common denominator of passive and antipassive was their detransitivising effect. If we interpret the reflexive constructions as the meeting ground of passive and antipassive, we get another and, I submit, better and more coherent picture of this field.

'agent fantôme'' by Boons et al. (1976). Lamiroy (1993) calls 4. 'moyen', which seems to correspond more or less to the tradition, and 5. 'passif'. Melis (1990) calls 4. 'non agentif'  and  5.  'médio-passif'.  Desclés  et  al.  (1986)  call  4.  'medio-passive'  and  5. 'passive'. 4. is called 'ergatif' by Zribi-Hertz (1987), cf. Lagaé (1990), and Grimshaw (1982) calls 4. 'inchoative' and 5. 'middle'. Add to this that not all writers classify the same examples in the same categories.

## 4.1. Antipassive Reflexives

This  is  not  the  time  nor  the  place  to  discuss  all  reflexive  verbs  and constructions,  so  I  have  to  limit  the  discussion  to  some  rather  clear types  which,  like  the  example  in  (15)  above,  are  problematic  or intractable in the five-way classificatory system. The following cases seem to adapt rather well to an antipassive interpretation.

## Ordinary reflexives

The ordinary reflexives which are always seen as unproblematic are in fact, as soon as you move away from the standard text-book examples of se laver 'wash' and se raser 'shave', quite varied and often quite difficult to reconcile with a standard reflexive meaning. They are for one  thing  often  highly  metonymic.  And  the  standard  paraphrases seldom or never work, cf. (16):

<!-- formula-not-decoded -->

A much better paraphrase would be something like (16'):

<!-- formula-not-decoded -->

Jean fait sa toilette

And this is exactly the standard meaning of the antipassive: the involvement of the Agent in some activity whose goal is either not mentioned, because it is too obvious to be specified or for other, textual or pragmatic reasons. Similar cases at hand are examples like the following:

```
(17) Julie est allée se changer. 'Julie has gone Refl change (i.e. clothes)' Julie est allée se préparer. 'Julie has gone to Refl prepare (i.e. do her make-up)'
```

It  is  obvious that standard paraphrases like (16) would be quite nonsensical in cases like these. The shades of meaning associated with socalled 'ordinary' reflexives seem always to be derivable from the core meaning of the antipassive.

## Verbs of communication

Certain communication verbs have reflexive uses which are not easily derived from their transitive use without setting up yet another type, viz. a 'metonymic' reflexive:

- (18) Jean exprime ses opinions clairement.

'Jean expresses his opinions clearly'

Jean s'exprime clairement (sur ce sujet).

'Jean expresses himself clearly (on this subject)'

Jean répète toujours les mêmes choses.

'Jean repeats always the same thing'

Jean se répète toujours.

'Jean always repeats himself'

Functionally, such reflexive clauses are antipassive and whatever metonymic meaning or shades of meaning are involved fall out from the basic  meaning  of  the  antipassive  and  the  content  of  the  involved lexemes. They are in fact instances of what Cooreman (1994:52) identifies  as  the  use  of  the  antipassive  where  the  Patient  is  entirely  predictable or obvious.

## Psychological verbs

The  description  of  the  antipassive  in  3.  above  revealed,  but  did  not discuss, a distinction within antipassives which is crucial for the understanding of certain psychological or emotional verbs. By identifying the Patient with the Agent - which was seen as one way of getting rid of the Patient in the antipassive - what happens is really a kind of promotion of  the  Patient:  the  demotion  of  the  Patientrôle is  performed  by  the promotion of the Patientphrase to the Agent-rôle and thereby to the subject  relation.  Foley  &  Van  Valin  (1985)  accordingly  distinguish backgrounding and foregrounding antipassives.  The  case  of  psychological reflexive verbs in French is a case of foregrounding antipassive. Compare the following:

- (19) Cette critique irrite le ministre.

'This criticism irritates the minister'

Le ministre s'irrite de cette critique.

'The minister Refl irritates Prep this criticism'

Cette situation inquiète/étonne le ministre.

'This situation worries/astonishes the minister'

Le ministre s'inquiète/s'étonne de cette situation.

'The minister Refl worries/astonishes Prep this situation'

Cases like these are impossible to enter into the standard classification of reflexives above.

## Isolated cases

Certain verbs do not seem to fit into any major classification. Here is a handful of cases which repeat the same pattern and the same story. The verb tromper ,  treated in (15) above, seems to belong here too. Other examples are:

- (20) Jean bat son adversaire.
2. 'Jean beats his adversary'
3. Jean se bat (contre son adversaire).
4. 'Jean Refl fights (against his adversary)'
5. Jean dépense beaucoup d'énergie.
6. 'Jean spends much energy.
7. Jean se dépense beaucoup.
8. 'Jean Refl spends much'

Examples like these are traditionally seen as the most clear instances of a middle meaning.

The reflexive antipassive often has a quite different meaning from the  corresponding  transitive,  but  a  meaning  difference  always  derivable, I surmise, from the general meaning of the antipassive. The differences can be slight, as in the contrast apercevoir - s'apercevoir de :

- (21) Jean aperçoit le trou.
2. 'Jean notices the hole'
3. Jean s'aperçoit de son erreur.
4. 'Jean becomes aware of his mistake'

They can be considerable or even seem unsurmountable as with the foregrounding construction ennuyer - s'ennuyer de :

- (22) Ses enfants ennuient Jean.
2. 'His children bore Jean'
3. Jean s'ennuie de ses enfants.
4. 'Jean misses his children'

Many such reflexive uses are consequently often classified as inherent (lexicalised), cf. e.g. Willems (1981:42).

## Verbs of motion

The antipassive characteristic, i.e. the highlighting of the Agent has yet another consequence: the extension of the reflexive marking to transitive or intransitive verbs of motion. Cf. the case of approcher , which has a transitive and two antipassive constructions:

(23) Transitive:

Jean approche sa main de la lampe.

'Jean approaches his hand to the lamp'

Intransitive:

Jean approche de la quarantaine.

'Jean approaches the age of 40'

Reflexive:

Jean s'approche de la maison.

'Jean Refl approaches Prep the house'

In the intransitive use of symmetrical verbs of motion such as sortir , the subject is or can be both Agent and Patient. But in the reflexive only an agentive reading is possible, and as in the case of décider vs. se décider à there is a nuance of overcoming an obstacle in the meaning of the antipassive:

(24) On va s'en sortir.

'We are going to Refl get out of this (dilemma)'

In  Old  French  this  was  a  quite  general  and  systematic  pattern,  cf. Herslund (1983), traces of which are still visible in  intransitive s'en aller .

## Summary of antipassive reflexives

The  antipassive  reflexives  pattern  into  three  types.  In  the  following table, 'S' means that the subject of the reflexive is the same as the subject of the transitive (1.), 'S = O' means that the subject of the reflexive can be either the subject or the object of the transitive, or both (2.) 3 , and 'O' means that the subject of the reflexive is the object of the transitive (3.),  cf.  the  distinction  between  subjective  and  objective  systems  in Melis (1990):

3 The consequences of this fundamental aspect of the 'ordinary reflexive' have not been sufficiently exploited in previous descriptions. It is exactly this which makes this type the meeting place of the backgrounding and the foregrounding antipassive.

<!-- formula-not-decoded -->

The foregrounding antipassive (3.), shares some important properties with the passive and constitutes the transition between antipassive and passive reflexives.

## 4.2. Passive Reflexives

As is well known, French has a regular passive construction with the past participle of transitive verbs and the verb être , cf. (3) above. Beside this construction, there are two different reflexive constructions which are also passive-like - albeit variously labelled by different grammarians, cf. note 2 - in the sense that they conform to the over-all passive schema of (2): demotion of the Agent and the consequent promotion of the Patient to subject. With one qualification, however: not only is the Agent demoted, it is so thorougly demoted that it cannot be expressed in either of them. The promotion of the Patient is what is common to the passive and the foregrounding antipassive.

## Passive

This construction can be described by the following schema:

- (26)

$$Reflexive Passive: Patient V Agent ◊ ÿ ◊ ◊ Subject se V Ø (+ Adverbial)$$

The Agent cannot be expressed, but its presence in the argument structure is attested by the possible presence of adverbs which can only be construed as qualifying an Agent (cf. the 'agent fantôme' of Boons et al. 1976):

<!-- formula-not-decoded -->

Ce tissu se nettoie facilement.

```
'This fabric Refl cleans easily'
```

Ce café se boit avec plaisir. 'This coffee Refl drinks with pleasure'

The  fundamental  characteristic  of  this  construction  is  its  general  or even generic, maxim-like, meaning. This meaning is well in accordance with the fact that the understood, but unexpressed and unexpressable Agent is maximally general. Sentences like these can in fact often be paraphrased  by  transitive  sentences  with  the  general  human  subject pronoun, on (cf.  Lamiroy  1993:66).  The  generic  aspect  is  explicitly brought out by a dislocation with cela :

- (28) Les vitres, ça se brise avec enthousiasme.

'Windows that Refl break with enthusiasm'

Les erreurs, ça se paie.

'Errors that Refl pay'

and by the fact that it mainly occurs in the present and the imperfect tenses.

## Medio-passive

This type of reflexive construction is characterised by the schema (29), where a change takes place in the argument structure itself, where the Agent is totally removed: the verbal action is presented as happening by itself and not even adverbs which could be seen as qualifying an absent Agent are permitted. To the active transitive schema corresponds an intransitive  schema  with  no  Agent.  To  the  causative  meaning  of  the active corresponds an uncausative meaning of the reflexive. So rather than medio-passive, I shall call this type uncausative :

| (29)   | Uncausative:   | Patient V    | Agent   |
|--------|----------------|--------------|---------|
|        |                | ↓ ↓          | ↓       |
|        | Patient        | V            | Ø       |
|        | ◊              | ÿ ◊          |         |
|        |                | Subject se V |         |

The construction is lexically severely constrained in the sense that not all verbs allow it, only those whose combination with a proper Patient permit a reading like the one mentioned above, i.e. of an action or process which, so to speak, happens by itself:

- (30) La porte s'ouvrit/s'est ouverte/s'ouvrira.

'The door Refl opened/has opened/will open'

Sa dernière syllabe s'étouffa.

'His last syllable Refl choked'

Là, son regard bleu s'éclaira de tendre ironie.

'There his blue gaze Refl lit up with tender irony'

La route si droite s'incurva après le hameau.

'The straight road Refl curved after the hamlet'

Aux tables de lecture les lampes s'éteignirent.

'At the reading tables the lamps Refl put out'

## The compatibility of the Patient subject and the verb is thus crucial:

- (31) L'écart s'est creusé progressivement.

'The gap Refl dug progressively'

*Le tunnel s'est creusé petit à petit.

'The tunnel ...'

## 5. Summary and Conclusion

The different reflexive constructions discussed are summed up in the following table:

<!-- image -->

The French reflexive constructions of the above picture, where the different types of antipassive and passive reflexives are spread out, depict a scale of agentivity from the most Agent-promoting antipassive con- struction (i.e. the backgrounding with suppression of the Patient) to the uncausative where there is no trace left of the Agent. So they conform to the following over-all scale:

(33)

Antipassive

Transitive

Passive

+...........................................Agent.....................................÷

Highlighting

Suppression

The two major types of reflexives, antipassive and passive, meet in the cases where the object of the transitive construction is the subject of the reflexive. What the two patterns have in common besides this, is, functionally speaking, the fact that both highlight one of the two participants of the transitive construction, the Agent in the case of the antipassive, the  Patient  in  the  case  of  the  passive.  Both  types  create  intransitive structures and this is signalled in the only way in which it is possible in French, namely by the intransitive inflexion of the verb by way of the auxiliary être .

The different reflexive constructions are however, as is well known, lexically constrained. But as shown by Kazenin (1994), there is often a clear connection between the semantic content of a verb and the kind of alternations  it  allows.  So  the  more  information  on  the  Agent  a  verb conveys, the greater its tendency to allow or prefer Agent-preserving operations such as the antipassive. Conversely, the more specific information it conveys on the Patient, the more Patient-preserving operations it will permit, such as the passive or the uncausative. Within the French reflexives, the Agent-oriented verbs, i.e. verbs describing the Agent's manipulation of something (cf. Kazenin 1994:149), have the backgrounding antipassive constructions, whereas the verbs allowing the foregrounding antipassive, the passive or the uncausative typically are verbs describing changes of state of the Patient without conveying much  information  on  a  possible  Agent's  bringing  about  of  such changes.

## References

Bittner, Maria (1987): On the Semantics of the Greenlandic Antipassive and Related Constructions. International Journal of American Linguistics 53. 194-231.

Boons, J.-P., A. Guillet & C. Leclère (1976): La structure des phrases simples en français. Constructions intransitives. Geneva-Paris: Droz.

- Cooreman, Ann. (1994): A Functional Typology of Antipassives. B. Fox & P. Hopper, eds. Voice. Form and Function , 49-88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Desclés, J.-P., Z. Guentchéva & S. Shaumyan (1986): Theoretical Analysis of Reflexivization in the Framework of Applicative Grammar. In: Lingvisticæ Investigationes 10. 1-65.
- Durst-Andersen, P. & M. Herslund (1996): The Syntax of Danish Verbs: Lexical and Syntactic  Transitivity.  E.  Engberg-Pedersen  et  al.,  eds. Content,  Expression  and Structure , 65-102. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Foley, W. A. & R. D. Van Valin, Jr. (1985): Information packaging in the Clause. T. Shopen, ed. Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Part I. Clause Structure , 282-364. Cambridge: The University Press.
- Gougenheim, Georges (1970): Etudes de grammaire et de vocabulaire français. Paris: Picard.
- Grimshaw, Jane (1982): On the Lexical Representation of Romance Reflexive Clitics. J.  Bresnan,  ed. The  Mental  Representation  of  Grammatical  relations ,  87-148. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
- Gross, Maurice (1968): Grammaire transformationnelle du français. Syntaxe du verbe . Paris: Larousse.
- Herslund, Michael (1983): La construction réfléchie en ancien français. P. Spore et al., eds. Actes du VIII e Congrès des Romanistes Scandinaves , 153-161. Odense: Odense University Press.
- Herslund, Michael (1996): Passiv og antipassiv i de franske refleksiver. In: Romansk Forum 4. 13-28. University of Oslo.
- Herslund, Michael (Forthcoming): Syntaktiske alternationer og funktionelle kategorier. In: Ny forskning i grammatik 4, 49-70. Odense: Odense University Press.
- Kazenin, Konstantin I. (1994): On the Lexical Distribution of Agent-Preserving and Object-Preserving Transitivity Alternations. In: Nordic Journal of Linguistics 17. 141-154.
- Lagaé, Véronique (1990): Les caractéristiques aspectuelles de la construction réflexive ergative . In: Travaux de Linguistique 20. 23-42.
- Lamiroy, Béatrice (1993): Pourquoi il y a deux passifs. G. Gross, ed. Sur le passif. In: Langages 109. 53-72.
- Lazard, Gilbert (1994): L'actance . Paris: PUF.
- Leclère, Christian (1993): Classes de constructions directes sans passif. G. Gross, ed. Sur le passif. In: Langages 109. 7-31.
- Melis, Ludo (1990): La voie pronominale. La systématique des tours pronominaux en français moderne. Louvain-la-Neuve: Duculot.
- Palmer, Frank (1994): Grammatical Roles and Relations. Cambridge: The University Press.
- Ruwet, Nicolas (1972): Théorie syntaxique et syntaxe du français. Paris: Seuil.

- Stéfanini, Jean (1971): A propos des verbes pronominaux. In: Langue française 11. 110-125.
- Sørensen, Finn (1986): Passivkonstruktioner er prædikatskonstruktioner. N. DavidsenNielsen & F. Sørensen, eds. Festskrift til Jens Rasmussen . In: CEBAL 8. 230-249. Copenhagen Business School.
- Willems, Dominique (1981): Syntaxe, lexique et sémantique . Gent: Rijksuniversiteit te Gent.
- Zribi-Hertz, Anne (1987): La réflexivité ergative en français moderne. In: Le français moderne 55. 23-54.