The Unique Status of Grooming Verbs

Abstract

The goal of this thesis is to find cross-linguistic evidence to indicate that grooming-type verbs are syntactically distinct from other agentive verbs, prompted by the initial observation that the English sentence John washed allows a reflexive interpretation while John defended does not. A combination of literature review, native speaker elicitations and utilisation of the NWO funded project “Universals and the Typology of Reflexives” [AnaTyp] database of questionnaires has contributed to the identification of five reflexivisation strategies that were unique to grooming-type verbs in their respective languages. Further analysis of these strategies shows that in many languages, grooming-type verbs allow theta-role bundling (see Reinhart & Siloni 2005) in syntactic environments that do not licence bundling for other agentive verbs. Although further research must establish how grooming-type verbs facilitate bundling, and why this does not occur in all languages, this thesis can be a stepping stone towards a full understanding of the unique status of grooming-type verbs.