Languages & Linguistics
Reflexive Pronouns
Reflexive pronouns are used to refer back to the subject of the sentence. They indicate that the subject of the sentence is also the recipient of the action. In English, reflexive pronouns include words like "myself," "yourself," "himself," "herself," "itself," "ourselves," "yourselves," and "themselves." These pronouns are essential for expressing actions that are performed by and directed back to the subject.
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eBook - PDFGrammaticalization at Work
Studies of Long-term Developments in English
- Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö, Kirsi Heikkonen, Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö, Kirsi Heikkonen(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Self- 278 Kirsti Peitsara pronouns in other uses but the reflexive, i.e. intensifying, substituting or purely contrastive .se//-compounds, are outside the scope of this study. In traditional linguistics, reflexivity is axiomatically a subcategory of transitivity. In the historical study of English this formal categorization be-comes problematic, because many verbs that from the present-day point of view are intransitive may in early English be connected to coreferential pronouns, which need not be in the accustomed object case, i.e. accusa-tive, or cannot otherwise be interpreted as objects of the action: (1) J^ider he wente him anon 'he went there immediately' (Dame Sirith 8) (2) All to son, my brother, I fere me, for yow 'even too soon for you, my brother, I'm afraid' (Mankind 162) This has necessitated establishing the particular category of'pleonastic re-flexives' to cover such exceptions. (See e.g. Mitchell 1985: 113-114; Mustanoja 1960: 100). 1 Any categorization on the basis of the case of the reflexive pronoun becomes useless with the loss of these distinctions after the Old English period. To avoid problems with 'exceptional' groups of reflexives, I prefer to raise reflexivity to the status of a superordinate category, covering all kinds of verbs with adjoining pronouns that are coreferential with the subject. These verbs include both traditionally transitive and intransitive ones. 2 A less strict connection between reflexivity and transitivity facili-tates particularly the admittance of reflexive constructions in which the referent is more prominently the agent or experiencer than the goal of the action, and the reflexive pronoun is not easily interpretable as a real ob-ject. This applies e.g. to verbs that, according to Ito (1978: 74), are char-acterized by 'built-in self-directness', such as verbs of motion or social be-haviour and some psychological verbs.
eBook - PDFLexical Anaphors and Pronouns in Selected South Asian Languages:
A Principled Typology
- Barbara C. Lust, Kashi Wali, James W. Gair, K. V. Subbarao, Barbara C. Lust, Kashi Wali, James W. Gair, K. V. Subbarao(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
A-1.2. Reflexive Pronouns Provide the forms that are commonly labeled as Reflexive Pronouns, for example, in traditional grammars. (Use the term reflexives instead of reflexive pro-nouns as much as possible.) What categories (person, number, gender, and case) apply to the reflexive? Provide a grammatical paradigm (abbreviated if necessary) for the relevant forms (3sg at least). Is there a possessive reflexive (e.g., I read [my!self s book])! Does it contrast with the possessive pronoun? Can the reflexive occur in subject position? A-1.3. Nouns as pronouns and reflexives Are nouns used as pronouns (e.g., mahatmaya 'gentleman', noonaa 'lady' in Sinhala) and/or as reflexives? A-l .4. Interrogative pronouns What is the morphological relation, if any, between the interrogative pronoun system and other pronouns? Do they form a set with other pronouns, e.g., in Telugu: waDu 'he' e-waDu 'who' a-kkada 'there' e-kkada 'where' Λ. Formal/morphological foundations Outline 863 Provide a sample grammatical paradigm for the interrogative pronouns in the language (person, number, gender, and case variation). A-1.5. Discourse Are there special forms for discourse anaphora? If so, describe them. Which forms allow discourse antecedents? Which do not? Are there any special logo-phoric forms? A-l .6. Deixis to situation Which forms allow deictic reference to the external situation? Which do not? A-l.7. Emphatic What are the relevant emphatic forms (see Glossary) of the language? (An em-phatic clitic or particle? An emphatic reflexive?) Provide the relevant emphatic forms that may intersect with the anaphora system or that resemble or are iden-tical to anaphoric forms. Does the emphatic inflect (person, number, gender)? Is there more than one form; for example, is there an emphatic on the noun and also an emphatic that is adjunct (e.g., by self)? Provide examples here.
eBook - PDF- Martin Durrell(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
62 Personal pronouns 3.2 Reflexive and reciprocal pronouns 3.2.1 Forms of the reflexive pronoun TABLE 3.2 The reflexive pronoun Accusative Dative ich setze mich ich bilde mir das ein du setzt dich du bildest dir das ein er/sie/es setzt sich er/sie/es bildet sich das ein wir setzen uns wir bilden uns das ein ihr setzt euch ihr bildet euch das ein Sie setzen sich Sie bilden sich das ein sie setzen sich sie bilden sich das ein setz dich! bilde dir das ein! setzt euch! bildet euch das ein! setzen Sie sich! bilden Sie sich das ein! The REFLEXIVE PRON OUN is a personal pronoun which refers back to the subject of the sentence or clause, e.g. Ich wasche mich ‘I wash myself’, Sie wäscht sich ‘She washes herself’. In German it has a special form sich which is used in the accusative and dative cases for the third person (singular and plural), and for the ‘polite’ second person. In the first and second persons, the personal pronouns given in Table 3.1 are used as Reflexive Pronouns. The German reflexive pronoun is much more frequent than English forms in -self , in particular with certain verbs which are mainly used with a reflexive pronoun – the so-called REFLEXIVE VERBS (see 16.3.5 and 16.4.3 ). Table 3.2 gives the forms of the reflexive pronoun with the present tense and the imperative of two ‘reflexive’ verbs, sich setzen ‘sit down’ and sich (das) einbilden ‘ imagine (that)’. This shows the reflexive pronoun in the accusative and dative cases. 3.2.2 Uses of the reflexive pronoun (a) The reflexive pronoun used after a preposition refers back to the subject of the verb Er hatte kein Geld bei sich Sie schlossen die Tür hinter sich He had no money on him They closed the door behind them The reflexive pronoun can also refer back to a dative object denoting a person with verbs whose dative object is the equivalent of an English subject (see 16.2.4d ): Ihm gefallen Geschichten über sich He likes stories about himself
eBook - PDF- Dany Adone, Ingo Plag, Dany Adone, Ingo Plag(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
koli(body-3) MARTINICAN her/himself (cf. Fr. 'se/soi-meme') b. en srefi (3-self) SRANAN her/himself (cf. Eng. himself) c. my yet (1 -head) TOK PISIN myself (cf. Eng. 'myself) The nature of these complex forms will be discussed in much detail below. The orientation of the work in this area has changed due to the publication of Garden and Stewart's seminal article from 1988. They argue on the basis of the distribution of the reflexives in Haitian dialects, coupled with some scant diachronic data, that early Haitian had bare pronoun reflexives. This raises the issue of whether early Creoles are fully natural languages, since this may go against universal grammatical principles (defined in Chomsky's Binding Theory, 1981), or rather resemble the pidgins from which they are derived. 46 Muysken and Smith Corne's work on Mauritian reflexives (1988; 1989) introduced a new dimension into this research: different sets of verbs often select different reflexive forms. Thus there is an intimate link as well with verb semantics and the way it is reflected in the argument structure and subcategorization frame of verbs. A dimension which needs to be explored further is to what extent principles of discourse organization influence the distribution of reflexive forms in those cases where several different forms are possible with a single verb. The state of the work on reflexives in Creoles is such that only an account in terms of a number of propositions is possible at the present time. 2. Diversity among the Creoles Creole languages exhibit a fair variety of reflexive structures. This section represents a preliminary attempt to classify the forms found. Due to lack of data, we will restrict ourselves to a small number of Creole languages here, so we do not wish to pretend that our conclusions are in any way definitive. In (2) we present an overview of the different types of reflexive forms encountered in the languages of the world.
eBook - PDFThe Acquisition of Creole Languages
How Children Surpass their Input
- Dany Adone(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
78 Introduction The study of pronouns plays a major part in understanding the mental representations of language. The cross-linguistic diversity and richness of pronominal systems have shown that these sys- tems follow constraints. These are of great importance for the- oretical issues such as functional categories, types of licensing mechanisms and locality constraints. Thus, much attention has been devoted to this topic (see Kayne 1975, Rizzi 1986, Brandi and Cordin 1989 among others). To define the nature of pronouns is not an uncontroversial task. In the current literature, pronouns are most commonly classified as either clitics or full pronouns, because of their different syntactic behaviour (see Brandi and Cordin 1989). In this chapter I present the pronominal systems of both Morisyen and Seselwa couched in the Government and Binding framework (GB) (Chomsky 1986) and explore the data gathered on four binding experiments conducted with Seselwa-speaking chil- dren. I argue that Creole-speaking children confirm the Principle B violation attested in other studies. I will show that children oblivi- ous to the input use the pronoun li reflexively before acquiring the target grammar. In spite of its evolution, Seselwa has retained a pro- noun that can be used reflexively, a feature of the early unmarked Creole grammar. These findings suggest strongly that children might start with a default grammar in which pronouns are also used reflexively. 5 Pronouns and reflexives Pronouns & reflexives in first language acquisition 79 Pronouns and reflexives in first language acquisition Within the generative field, Binding Theory (BT) is considered to be a major component of the computational system of adult syntax. A widespread view concerning the acquisition of binding is that young children do not have knowledge of Principle B of the BT (see Lust 1986 for a review).
eBook - PDF- Emma Geniusiené(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The latter two instances are similar to RMs in a number of non-IE languages (see 3b) in section 4.3.2.1). Whatever the status of a RM in a particular language, their equivalence is established on the basis of their functional similarity. Thus, the ap-proach 'from meaning (function) to form' is applied here. Languages employing Reflexive Pronouns as RMs may also vary on the parameter of the morphological properties of the latter. The following types of pronominal RMs are observed: (i) an invariable reflexive pronoun proper, like the Lithuanian save 'one-self used for all the persons and both numbers, cf.: (24 a) AIgerbiu save Ί respect myself b) Tu gerbi save 'You respect yourself c) Jis gerbia save 'He respects himself 240 4. Λ typology of reflexives d) Mes gerbiame save 'We respect ourselves' e) Jus gerbiate save 'You respect yourselves' f) Jie gerbia save 'The respect themselves'; (ii) a variable reflexive pronoun marked for person and number, like the English oneself which is also marked for gender in the 3.P. Sg. {himself, herself, itself)·, a similar set of pronouns is used in Dutch except that it employs in the 3rd person the form %ich%elf to express coreference of roles in instances like (25a) below and %ich in all other instances, including verbs such as (25b): (25 a) Jan lag lich^elf 'Jan saw himself b) Jan heeft %ich aangekleed 'Jan has dressed himself (Faltz 1977: 50, 52); (iii) a series or pronouns comprising personal pronouns for the 1st and 2nd person and a reflexive pronoun for the 3rd person, cf. Latin mejtej nos/vos/se (further collectively referred to as the RM se), German michj dichjunsjeuchjsich (the RM sich)', (iv) a paradigm of personal pronouns, like in Frisian, employing the objective case of personal pronouns for all persons including the 3rd person, e. g.: (26) Hja skammet bar she shames her 'She is ashamed' (Xalipov 1970: 159-160).
eBook - PDFStudies in the History of the English Language
A Millennial Perspective
- Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell, Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Explaining the creation of Reflexive Pronouns in English * Edward L. Keenan We provide an account of the historical creation and interpretation of the English reflexives ( himself , herself , …) in terms of (1) two general, not spe-cifically linguistic, forces of change: Decay and Inertia ; (2) two universal semantic constraints on language: Constituency Interpretation and Anti-Synonymy , and (3) the initial state of the Old English (OE, c750–c1150) anaphora system. In comparison with other approaches the changes as we present them do not rely on parameter resetting and are not primarily instances of grammaticalization, though this plays a role in one change. We also, standardly, invoke Pattern Generalization , whereby a rule or paradigm that applies to a limited range of cases extends to new ones. Our study is based on some 11,000 instances of locally bound objects of verbs and prepositions, drawn from over 100 texts dating from c750 to c1750. Keenan (2000, 2001) present these data extensively, as well as the list of source materials. 1. Forces of change: D ECAY and I NERTIA Decay Things wear out Decay is familiar from cases where phonological reduction obscures mor-pheme boundaries. An example is the negative n’t in Don’t blink , where we may distinguish at least four steps reading back from Modern Standard English (MSE) 1 to Old English: n’t < not < ne+aught < ne+a/an+wiht ‘not one whit (thing)’. More systematic cases throughout Middle English (ME, c1150–1500) are vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and the loss of word final un-stressed vowels, often the last remaining traces of case inflection. Thus OE disyllabic nama ‘name’, naman ‘names’ with word initial stress, becomes 326 Edward L. Keenan disyllablic name , namen in Early Middle English and then monosyllabic name , names in Modern Standard English. A commonly noted case of semantic Decay is the historical weakening of demonstratives to become definite articles.
eBook - PDFReciprocals and Reflexives
Theoretical and Typological Explorations
- Ekkehard König, Volker Gast, Ekkehard König, Volker Gast(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
These strategies are defined in terms of conceptual discontinuities; with reference to morphosyntactic structure, this implies that reflexives can be derived from a range of quite different forms, in particular from pronouns, noun phrases, and adverbial modifiers (see Faltz 1977; Evans this volume; K¨ onig and Kokutani 2006). Table 2. The main strategies to develop reflexive markers. Label Strategy a pronoun 8 Use personal pronouns b intensifier Add an intensifier (‘-self’) to (a) c body 9 Use a body-noun (plus possessive attribute) d alone Use an adverbial ‘alone’ or ‘only’ e Other sources Mostly opaque The strategy labels used in Table 2 are not entirely satisfactory, since they re-fer to entities that are syntactically disparate. Our reason for proposing them nevertheless is that we wish to use terms that are as conceptually specific as possible. This means that in the case of body and alone we are able to narrow down the conceptual sources of reflexives to a highly specific range of concepts, while in the case of the pronoun strategy we had to decide on a fairly general morphosyntactic notion since it is the entire range of personal pronouns that is associated with this strategy. The pronoun strategy can be illustrated with the following example, where plain personal pronouns are used for reflexive reference: (5) German Ich I habe have mich me verletzt . hurt ‘I’ve hurt myself.’ 8. The pronoun strategy is commonly called the [uR] (“unmarked reflexive“) strategy. 9. This strategy is called the “noun strategy” in Heine (2003). The intersection between reflexives and reciprocals 175 Most languages using the pronoun strategy restrict it to first and second person referents. Only a minority uses it for third person referents in addition, docu-mented cases being Old English, Frisian, Harway (a non-Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea), a number of Malayo-Polynesian languages, as well as some pidgins and creoles (cf. Carden and Stewart 1989: 85; Heine 2003).
- Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible, Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
3.3. The scope of verbal reflexives In the previous section, it was argued that verbal reflexives can occur in a rather wide set of syntactic configurations, contrary to the usual assumption that they only can mark coreferentiality between the agent and the patient. However, an important restric-tion on verbal reflexives is their clause-bound-ness. In this respect verbal reflexives differ from Reflexive Pronouns, which in some lan-guages can have antecedents outside their clause (long-distance anaphora, in genera-tive terms - see Koster & Reuland (eds.) 1991). This asymmetry is illustrated by the following Russian examples: (16) (a) Ivan nazval -sjal nazval sebja Ivan called -REFL/ called himself predstavitel-em prezident-a representative -iNSTR president -GEN 'Ivan claimed to be (lit. called him-self) a representative of the presi-dent.' 920 X. Syntactic Typology (b) Gubernator razresil Ivan-u governor allowed Ivan-DAT nazvat '-sja predstavitel-em call-REFL representative-iNSTR prezident-a president-GEN 'The governor; allowed Ivanj to call himself*i/j a representative of the president.' (c) Gubernator razresil Ivan-u governor allowed Ivan-DAT nazvat' sebja predstavitel-em call self representative-iNSTR prezident-a president-GEN 'The governor; allowed Ivanj to call himselfi/j a representative of the president.' The interpretation of (16b) shows that the verbal reflexive requires an antecedent in its own clause (to the effect that the non-ex-pressed subject of the infinitive obligatorily becomes the antecedent of the embedded ver-bal reflexive). The only case when verbal reflexives can be not clause-bound is their logophoric use. The term 'logophoric', originally introduced in Hagège 1974, refers to contexts of reporta-tive verbs where the speaker is coreferential with the protagonist of the reported situa-tion.
eBook - PDFA Grammar of Koyra Chiini
The Songhay of Timbuktu
- Jeffrey Heath(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Even within this semantic type, reflexive transitive verbs are nowhere near as common as in French, Spanish, and other European languages. 10.2.4 Syntax of Reflexive Pronouns In this section we complete the analysis of the syntactic configurations requiring Reflexive Pronouns. We will focus on third person constructions, since only 3Refl is overtly distinct from corresponding nonReflexive Pronouns. For first and second persons we can imagine covert [+reflexive] marking if we wish, but no empirical issue is involved. We consider in turn simple clauses, then conjoined NPs beginning with (646), then adverbially juxtaposed clauses beginning with (647), then relative clauses beginning with (650), and finally subjunctive clauses beginning with (654). The configuration accounting for most examples of reflexives is of the general type (639). (639) [ s NP X -verb - ... NP, ...] where the first NP X is the subject of the sentence S We will refer to the subject NP X as the antecedent, and to the postverbal NP X as the coindexed NP. If the antecedent succeeds in binding the coindexed NP, we get an anaphoric (3Refl) pronoun. We first consider simple cases where the coindexed NP is not part of an embedded clause, and is not a possessor to another NP. This applies to direct objects, objects of postpositions, and complements of prepositions like Instr-Comit nda 'with'. In these syntactic functions, the coindexed NP is usually realized as a bomo reflexive, in which case the anaphor is expressed as the 3Refl possessor of bomo 'head'. In §10.2.1, above, (630) shows instances following Instr-Comit nda (line 2 of KCh text) and preceding Dat postposition se (line 6), while (631b-c) illustrate direct objects, bomo is indeed normal in all of these syntactic functions. The less common alternative is to use simple pronouns, including 3Refl for third person. I have no textual or elicited examples of such pronouns following nda 'with, 334 10 Anaphora, logophorics, and reported speech and'.
eBook - PDFNew Challenges in Typology
Broadening the Horizons and Redefining the Foundations
- Matti Miestamo, Bernhard Wälchli, Matti Miestamo, Bernhard Wälchli(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
In the case in point, the study of intensifiers in ancient IE lan-guages has provided new data which has led to the adjustment of some typological generalizations. Intensifiers, in many languages, are identical to reflexives. This is the case in English (see examples 11 and 12) but this is, nevertheless, a very widespread pattern. 262 Nicoletta Puddu (11) I see myself in the mirror (12) I washed my car myself On the other hand, some languages distinguish reflexives and intensifiers. This is the case in German ( sich vs. selbst ). In these languages which clearly distinguish between emphatics and reflexives, the two forms can combine to form the so-called “emphatic reflexive” (German sich selbst ). According to König and Gast (2006: 227), intensifiers “form a distribu-tional class with a highly heterogeneous morpho-syntax”. They can be identified crosslinguistically mainly on the basis of prosodic and semantic features. They are always stressed and they evoke alternatives to the refer-ent of the head they are adjoined to. Crucially they structure the focused element and its alternatives in terms of centre and periphery. Reflexives and intensifiers differ in their distribution: reflexives are used in argument positions (11) whereas intensifiers occur in adjunct posi-tions to some noun phrase (12). In Puddu (2005) I examined the prototypical intensifiers in attested an-cient IE languages. 10 Here, I will deal with some features of Greek autós ‘self, same’, and Latin ipse ‘self’ since they are particularly interesting from a typological point of view. 11 König (2001: 752) contends that languages which distinguish morpho-logically between intensifiers and Reflexive Pronouns do not use intensifi-ers in argument positions without an overtly expressed (pro)nominal head to which they attach.
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