A new perspective on the historical development of English intensifiers and reflexives
A new perspective on the historical development of English intensifiers and reflexives
This chapter gives an innovative account of a distinctive property of the reflexive paradigm in English within Germanic: the absence of morphologically simplex reflexives like German sich, Dutch zich. It argues that the complex pronoun+self pattern in English originates from the combination of a null pronoun plus the intensifier pro+self: [Ø [pro+self ]]. The spread of this intensified pattern was propagated through ‘anti-reflexive’ predicates, which pragmatically disfavour reflexive complements, such as threaten, afflict. Anti-reflexive predicates required intensified reflexives, while corpus searches in Old and Middle English show that inherently reflexive predicates did not, supporting the claim that the pro+self pattern spread from the former source.
Keywords: simplex reflexives, Germanic, null pronoun, intensifiers, anti-reflexive predicates
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