The Involuntary state construction in Serbo-Croatian
Tatjana Ilic, Linguistics
The Involuntary state construction (ISC) is a puzzling construction whose meaning does not seem to be derivable from its morphosyntactic composition (1).
Marku se jedu orasi.
Mark.dat Reflcl imperf.eat.prs.3. pl walnuts.nom.pl
‘Mark feels like eating walnuts.’
It occurs with dative experiencer, nominative theme, nonreferential reflexive pronoun se, and active agentive verb that agrees with the nominative NP. It expresses an involuntary desire, need, or urge to participate in the event denoted by the predicate. However, the source of this meaning has no overt morphological or lexical expression, and therefore seems entirely unmotivated. Moreover, this construction has a noneventive meaning, even though it occurs with an active eventive verb.
The ISC occurs most notably in Slavic languages, with possible counterparts in Finnish and Albanian, and has only recently received attention in the syntactic literature. In order to solve the puzzle of the ISC, linguists have attempted both monoclausal and biclausal analyses, and approached the problem from both syntactic and semantic perspectives. In all these analyses, the involuntary desiderative meaning is derived by recourse to null elements - a theoretically unappealing option.
In this paper I present an alternative analysis of the ISC and derive its meaning from the interaction between three overt elements: 1) properties of the nonreferential relfexive clitic se, 2) aspectual restrictions of the verb, and 3) applicative syntactic structure with the dative experiencer NP as affected indirect object functioning as sentence-level topic. The proposed analysis is framed within the Minimalist Program.