Deposing deponency: Latin non-denominal deponents are not grammatically idiosyncratic verbs

Abstract

Abstract Latin deponents are usually treated as morphological idiosyncrasies in which the Middle morphology is not related to an anticausative (change of state), reflexive or passive syntactic structure, in which it would be expected and grammatically justified (Embick, David. 2000. Features syntax and categories in the Latin perfect. Linguistic Inquiry 31(2). 185–230; Xu, Zheng, Mark Aronoff and Frank Anshen. 2007. Deponency in Latin. In Matthew Baerman et al. (eds.), Deponency and morphological mismatches, 127–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press). Focusing on the non-denominal deponents, I show that these verbs are always reflexives or anticausatives. In the reflexive and anticausative structures a single argument gains two thematic roles, the most external one, doer for the reflexives, undergoer for the anticausatives, and a lower one (holder of a state, benefactive, etc.). The Latin Middle morphology marks the external role as syntactically deactivated but semantically existential and allows for the assignment of the external role to a lower argument. The peculiarity of deponents is not the presence of the Middle, but the fact that, because of specific lexical constraints, these verbs cannot be present in an Active derivation. Similar lexically constrained verbs which can only appear in anticausative or reflexive structures are crosslinguistically attested: deponents are not Latin idiosyncrasies.