Liminal morphosyntax: Georgian deponents and their kin. Kevin Tuite Université de Montréal 1 Deponents and deponency The term ‘deponent’, once restricted to the specialized jargon of Latin grammar, has come to be used a bit more frequently in the linguistic literature of the past fifteen years or so. In traditional Latin descriptive grammar, deponents comprise “une catégorie de verbes actifs pour le sens, mais qui paraissent se dépouiller (deponere) de la forme active attendue, pour revêtir la forme passive” (Monteil 1970: 261). Verbs such as sequor “I follow”, agricolor “I cultivate land, practice agriculture”, pergraecor “I live in the ‘Greek manner’ (as understood by the Romans, i.e. feasting and pleasure-seeking)”, etc. are distinguished from regular active and passive verbs by their hybrid morphology — the finite paradigms are passive, whereas the present and future participles are formed as for active verbs — and the impression many Latinists have had that deponents are “passive in form but active in meaning”, as the school grammars say. Latin deponents do not ordinarily have active counterparts, a trait that has brought them to the attention of researchers exploring the morphology, semantics and syntax of middle voice, or of what Klaiman (1988) calls ‘basic voice systems’, as contrasted to ‘derived voice’ (active-passive) systems. Latin does not have a middle voice as such, but Kemmer (1993: 22) juxtaposes Latin deponents to the media tantum of Greek and other basic-voice languages, these being formally middle verbs which do not contrast with actives formed from the same stem. From a diachronic perspective, Kemmer’s equation of deponents and media tantum seems justifiable, since the personal endings of the Latin passive do go back in part to the IE middle diathesis (Szemerényi 1996: 242-243), and the roots of some Latin deponents are cognate to Greek and Sanskrit media tantum (e.g. Latin sequor, Greek hepomai, Sanskrit sacate “follow” < IE *sek w -). On the other hand, the Romans themselves are not known to have compared Latin deponents to Greek middles (Flobert 1975: 577). In recent, as yet unpublished work, Corbett (1999, p. c.) has extended the reach of the term ‘deponency’ to accommodate any non-typical use of inflectional morphology, whether or not it has anything to do with verbs or voice. Russian životnoe “animal”, a syntactic noun which declines like an adjective, would be considered a deponent word by this definition. I concur with Corbett’s criticism of many past uses of the deponency concept, which tend to emphasize certain traits of Latin deponents while downplaying others. Some definitions focus on semantics (“passives with active meaning”, although the latter criterion is rarely accorded a rigorous definition); others highlight the lack of an active counterpart, or the hybrid nature of Latin deponent paradigms (Flobert 1967: xi). In the discussion to follow, I will limit the use of the term ‘deponent’ to its traditional territory, but with a more narrow definition. Consider the case of media tantum. Middle voice is the marked category relative to active voice. Descriptions of the semantics of middle verbs characteristically take the corresponding actives as the starting point, and describe the special function of the middle as one of foregrounding the effect of the action upon the subject (‘subject-affectedness’; Kemmer 1993, 1994), the subject’s particular involvement or ‘interiority’ in the process denoted by the verb (Benveniste 1950), or that “a process is taking place with regard to, or is affecting, happening to” the subject (Gonda 1960: 66), etc. In