Semantics or grammar? Correlates to middle marking in Dena'ina Athabaskan iterative verbs

While recent studies of Athabaskan middle verbs have attempted to find a unified semantic motivation for their presence, iterative verbs, which are a subset of middle verbs, have generally been analyzed as divergent, having a grammatical, rather than semantic, motivation. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of iteratives from traditional Dena'ina (Athabaskan, Alaska) narratives. This analysis strongly suggests that semantics rather than grammatical transitivity plays a role in the triggering of overt morphological marking of middles and thus supports the assumption of a semantically unified class of middle verbs. More specifically, we show that in Dena'ina iterative verbs, middle marking is more likely to occur when the spatial starting and ending points of the action of the verb are undifferentiated.