On Russian Dative Reflexive Constructions: Accidental or Compositional?

It is argued that the meaning of Russian dative reflexive constructions, i.e. constructions of the type Ivanu ne rabotaetsja ‘Ivan does not feel like working’, is compositional. It is shown that the reflexive marker -sja in general signals reduced agentivity and/or increased patientivity of the subject. One of the possible particular construals of -sja is ‘the subject’s volitionality is decreased’. For reasons explained in the paper, purely “quantitative” reduction (‘the subject is less willing to carry out the action, and/or has less inner resources necessary for the action’) is improbable, which forces the speakers to look for other circumstances reducing the subject’s responsibility for the action. This is an easy task, since, on the one hand, one may always believe that the subject’s desires and/or inner resources are due to an external irrational force acting upon the subject, and, on the other hand, we tend to speak of such a force only where the action is indeed carried out, which attenuates the responsibility of the subject. As far as the subject in dative reflexive constructions stops to be the initial point in the relevant causal chain and becomes in some sense a beneficiary, the nominative-dative shift in its morphology is only the side effect of non-reflexive-to-reflexive transformation. Thus, both the meaning of dative reflexive constructions and their form turn out to be predictable from the general meaning of the reflexive marker -sja