Reflexive in the Khakass language: structure and semantics

This study determines the structural and semantic features of the reflexive (reflexive voice) in Khakass, taking into account the peculiarities of the Turkic conceptualization of the reflexivity semantics in the language. The paper considers the aspects of the study of the voice category in the theory of linguistics and presents the discussion of linguists regarding the nature of the reflexive. It is indicated that a reflexive verb in the Khakass language denotes the active action of its agent, i.e., the source and the object of the action. It is shown that reflexive is formed from transitive and intransitive verbs with agentive semantics. The following basic signs of reflexivity are defined: agentivity, abstractness, intransitivity, and semi-transitivity. The main semantic types of reflexive in the Khakass language have been revealed, including the medial, partitive-reflexive, total, benefactive, autocausative, and decausative. The study results are as follows: 1) the meaning of the reflexive in the Khakass language does not go beyond its semantic limits in other languages; 2) modification of active verbs into the reflexive causes a full or partial generalization of action; 3) a partial generalization maintains the action transitivity to the object that is in a possessive relationship with the subject, creating a reflexive verb of activity; 4) a complete generalization makes the action intransitive, forming a reflexive verb of quality; 5) the reflexive meaning can be supplemented with active one. The work was performed with data from the Electronic Corpus of the Khakass language and personal fieldwork data.