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

What is it about?

In Latin there are some verbs which appear only with the Middle morphology and never with the Active one, even if their apparent meaning is active. In this paper I explain that also in these cases the Middle morphology is syntactically and morphologically justified, being these verb lexically constrained to appear only in Middle contexts, as anticausatives (the chair broke), reflexives and benefactives. The Middle morphology, on these verbs, then, is not an idiosyncratic feature of the verbal root.

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Why is it important?

In a general linguistic perspective, this paper proposes evidences against an account of morphological marking that is non based on the syntactic and semantic computation. In a language specific perspective, it proposes a coherent account of a class of Latin verbs that has usually been treated as specific to this language and not analyzable if not by means idiosyncratic and not generalizable markers.