Ling Fridays Colloquia: Keating on Quechua pseudo-reflexives

An analysis of Quechua’s pseudo-reflexive morphemes 

Cailie Keating, undergraduate Linguistics and Spanish major, will present her Hilldale research project that she is completing with Professor Grant Armstrong.

In person

Reflexivity can generally be defined as a process whereby reflexive verbs have subjects that are also considered their direct objects, thus allowing the action of the verb to be both committed and received by the same thing. Cross-linguistically, this relation can surface either as a series of pronouns or as a morphological marker. However, what are considered to be reflexive morphemes sometimes display other properties that are not directly correlated with reflexivity. In this presentation, I will discuss how Quechua’s suffixes -ri and -ku seem to adopt these characteristics of pseudo-reflexivity through anti-causative constructions, inchoative constructions, as well as verbal derivation.