Classifying French reflexive verbs through corpus annotation

The different uses of reflexive verbs that are usually distinguished in the literature (properly reflexive, reciprocal, anticausative, mediopassive, etc.) have rarely been put to the test of extensive corpus annotations. The aim of this study is to define an operational classification of French reflexive verb forms and a methodology for analyzing them in context, and to provide an annotated corpus of French reflexives that could be further exploited in quantitative studies. The annotation experiment shows how difficult it is to differentiate reflexive interpretations on a case-by-case basis. This difficulty is due both to general issues in verbal analysis and to the porosity between certain classes of reflexives. The annotated corpus data exhibit a series of results, including the large number of lexically autonomous uses of reflexives and the relative scarcity of properly reflexive uses.