The Swedish absolute reflexive construction in a cross-linguistic perspective

Sammanfattning: Swedish has the absolute reflexive construction, where a reflexive marker appears to be usedas an antipassive marker. Similar constructions, with omitted objects and reflexive marking on the verb, are found in Slavic and Baltic languages and is only possible with a small set of verbs.This study examines this group of verbs in Swedish and a sample of European languages andfinds that the verbs express unwanted action on an animate patient. They also share features of non-resultativity, potential reciprocality and atelicity. A set of core meanings, including ‘hit’,‘push’ and ‘bite’ are the most frequently occurring in absolute reflexives also in Slavic and Baltic languages. Lexical semantics hence play an important role in the extension of functions of reflexive markers in these languages. There is a functional overlap of reciprocal and absolute reflexive function in all of the languages, resulting in clauses with ambiguous reading between reciprocal and antipassive. It is suggested that the antipassive function of reflexive markers has grammaticalized from the reciprocal function of this marker.