Introducing diri: Understanding the Role of diri as a Reflexivizer

Abstract

The expression of reflexivity in Indonesian and related languages is based on various strategies, see Cole and Hermon (2005), Kartono (2013), and Schadler (2014) for discussion. This paper focuses on the expression of reflexivity based on the element diri and its cognates, not discussed in these papers. As a reflexive marker, bare diri is not specified for grammatical features such as number, gender, and person, so it imposes no restrictions on the value of the subject argument. It is only allowed with a subset of verbs, namely agent– theme verbs. Our goal is to determine its precise role. After applying a number of diagnostics for argumenthood (Dimitriadis and Everaert 2014), we show that diri is not an argument. We propose that the role of diri is that of an element marking detransitivization of the verb and reflecting an operation combining the latter’s agent and theme roles into one complex agent–theme role (“a bundling operation” in the sense of Reinhart and Siloni 2005). This complex role is assigned to the remaining argument resulting in a reflexive interpretation. Further tests also show that agent and patient roles are indeed present in verbs with diri after the bundling operation.