Zompist Bboard Again

In a reflexive voice, one reduces valency by equating a subject and an object (less commonly a subject and an oblique or something that can be roughly construed as an oblique, such as a possessor: il se casse le bras "he breaks his own arm"). Is there a known instance of a voice that equates an object and an oblique? An "object reciprocal" voice, so to say: I rub/fold it against itself, I glue/sew/press it to itself etc.

I can't think of an example, but I believe many languages can do something like that. However, I think it usually wouldn't be used with sufficient frequency to get grammaticalized to the degree of a typical "voice". As in your English example, it would likely remain periphrastic. And even if it did grammaticalize into an affix, I suppose most linguists would treat it as a derivational operation rather than an inflection, considering that semantically it could be said to be a combination of two more typical valency-changing operations that are themselves often treated as at least semi-derivational, namely a causative of a reflexive. (Alternatively it might perhaps also be interpreted as a reflexive operator added to an applicative.) I would also guess that languages able to express such a category purely morphologically would be likely to do so with a combination of the two basic morphemes rather than having a separate unitary morpheme for "object reflexives".

Causatives of reflexives are definitely attested. Checking some likely places, I found Bantu, Quechua, and Turkish examples. Baker, The Mirror Principle and Morphosyntactic Explanation has some examples in section 4.1 (starting p.391).

It would be interesting to see this sort of reflexive marked on the preposition:

I folded it against-REFL (it) = "I folded it against itself"

Curlyjimsam wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 4:41 am It would be interesting to see this sort of reflexive marked on the preposition:

I folded it against-REFL (it) = "I folded it against itself"

Like in Takelma language?

I thought High Lulani might have something like this, so I searched my dictionary for self or reflexive. Turns out I did originally, but I repurposed that word to be "third person topic pronoun" long ago without actually updating the dictionary. Oops.