establish âMichaelâ as the topical or basic third person and âJohnâ as the obviative ... understood as coreferential with âGeorgeâ. ...... 52) Ãa behydde Adami hinei.
On the Grammaticalization of Reflexivity and Related Categories Borja Herce Calleja - English Studies - 4th grade Tutor: Carlos García Castillero - Indo-European Limguistics
2014
INDEX 1. Summary…………………………………………………………..….……page 2 2. Introduction: What is Reflexivity?…………………………………………page 3 3. Reflexivity: Crosslinguistic strategies……………………………………..page 5 3.1. Lack of a Dedicated Strategy………………………………………….page 5 3.2. Head Reflexives………………………………………………….……page 8 3.3. Adjunct Reflexives……………………………………………………page 8 3.4. Pronominal Reflexives………………………………………………...page 9 3.5. Verbal Reflexives……………………………………………….……page 10 3.6. Multiple Strategies……………………………………………….…..page 10 4. Associated Categories………………………………………………….…page 11 4.1.Middle……………………………………………………………..….page 11 4.2. Intensifiers………………………………………………………...….page 12 4.3. Reciprocals………………………………………………………...…page 14 4.4. Logophorics……………………………………………………….....page 15 5. Diachronic Developments in Reflexivity……………………...………….page 16 5.1. The Grammaticalization Process…………………………………….page 16 5.2. Diachronic Developments in Reflexivity………………………….....page 17 5.3. Diachronic Developments in Associated Categories……………..….page 19 5.4. A Semantic Map of Reflexivity and Associated Categories……..….page 24 6. The Case of English……………………………………..………………..page 25 6.1. Old English…………………………………………………………..page 25 6.2. Middle English………………………………………………………page 27 6.3. Modern English……………………………………..……………….page 29 7. Conclusion………………………………………….…………………….page 32 8. Bibliography…………………………………………………………..…..page 33
1
1. SUMMARY The main purpose of the present paper is to provide a comprehensive picture of the phenomenon of reflexivity in language and to shed light on the grammaticalization processes and patterns of change leading to the frequent sharing of the same morphology by reflexives and other categories. In the introduction I will present some basic necessary notions and I will try to delimit the scope of the present study by exposing the different phenomena generally subsumed under the name of reflexivity. The first main section deals with reflexivity proper from a semantic perspective. I will survey the different morphological strategies existing for the coding of reflexive situations across languages analyzing as well the case of languages lacking reflexive morphology altogether or having more than a single strategy. In the second part of the paper the morphological approach predominates, as some categories (intensifiers, anticausatives, passives, antipassives, reciprocals…) commonly associated with reflexivity by means of a shared morphology are introduced. The third section abandons the synchronic approach to reflexivity which characterizes the first two chapters giving way to a diachronic approach. The frequent paths of grammaticalization and meaning extension within reflexives and between reflexives and its associated categories are uncovered and represented in an ad hoc semantic map. Last but not least, I present an example of a well-documented historical change involving the reflexive pronouns of English which illustrates in a detailed way one of the main paths for diachronic change put forth in the previous section.
2
2. INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS REFLEXIVITY? The notion of reflexivity, which also appears in other branches of social sciences with various unrelated meanings, applies in Linguistics to the phenomenon whereby two or more expressions (most frequently NPs) are used to refer to the same entity or individual. The two expressions sharing a single referent will be said to be coreferential and such a reading may be made explicit, in linguistic analysis, by co-indexation: 1) The new museum was opened by Elizabeth IIi on Monday. The British monarchi highlighted the importance of the event as… Such references as the one in the example above are usually transparent and independent of syntactic dependencies. This is, however, usually not the case and the meaning of at least one of the referential expressions is often dependent on the other: 2) A new kind of military deploymenti has arrived in Irak. Iti will include less… Such an expression whose interpretation depends on another one (which has been most usually previously mentioned) is usually called an anaphor. It is worth emphasizing the fact that, within generative grammar, this term is used with a more narrow meaning, being limited to those referential expressions whose interpretation must compulsorily depend on another. Such dependence of meaning is, in addition, based on syntactic relations holding between the two elements. These dependency conditions are studied within the binding theory of Chomsky, whose renowned conditions1 account for the widespread existence of two different kinds of pronouns2 throughout most languages and their distribution, even if not without some problems3. It will be this narrower interpretation of “anaphor” which is usually relevant when talking about reflexivity in grammar and which will constitute the object of the present paper.
1
A) An anaphor must be bound in its governing category. B) A pronoun must be free in its governing category. C) A referential expression must be free.
2
The so-called anaphors or reflexive pronouns, whose reference is always derived from another expression and the “normal” nonreflexive pronouns that can have an independent reference. 3
Data from many languages, including English, show that the requirement for local binding doesn’t apply to all anaphors: there are frequent occurrences of locally free reflexive pronouns in English as well as phenomena such as long-distance reflexives, for example in Icelandic. For a more detailed discussion and examples see Reuland (1999)
3
Having already delimited the scope of the present study, it must be highlighted that there are two different perspectives to deal with reflexivity, a semantic and a morphological perspective. From a semantic point of view, reflexivity has as its most clear domain that of an individual performing an action upon himself/herself; that is, we will have a transitive verb with a coreferential subject and object: 3) “Hei criticized himselfi”
(core reflexivity)
Such kind of situation may be grammatically expressed by means of a single morphological strategy or by more than one (depending on conditions which will be mentioned later on) and such strategy/strategies may be also used to express different (albeit somehow related) situation types. The morphological approach to reflexivity will thus focus on the different (reflexive and nonreflexive) uses of the otherwise reflexive morphology. In the present paper, reflexivity will be analyzed from both of these perspectives. I feel obliged to highlight that the key purpose of reflexivity in language is to distinguish situations of coreferentiality (like that of the previous example) from those of so-called disjoint reference like the following: 4) Hei criticized himj Such disambiguating function of reflexive morphology appears more frequently in subject-object relations like the previous one but is by no means limited to those contexts. Notice the ambiguity of the following English sentences whose two readings are, however, distinguished by reflexive morphology in other languages: 5) Tomi lost hisi/j tickets
(adnominal possessor)
6) Hei found an old coffin near himi/j
(object of preposition)
Given the difficulty of trying to cover such a wide range of reflexive phenomena and given the fact that reflexive morphology appears crosslinguistically much more frequently in contexts like 3) than in 5) or 6), I will focus here, whenever I want to pursue a semantic approach, in those “core reflexivity” situations involving coreferentiality of subject and object.
4
3. REFLEXIVITY: CROSSLINGUISTIC STRATEGIES Core reflexive situations in which some individual performs an action upon him/herself and in which thus the agent (I hurt myself) or experiencer (I see myself) is at the same time the patient or theme can be of course expressed in any human language that we know of. This doesn’t mean, however, that there is a single universal strategy for languages to express such a situation. Indeed, it doesn’t mean either that a language needs to have a morphologized or grammaticalized dedicated strategy4 to do so. Much in the same way as many languages (like for example Chinese) lack a morphologized distinction between present and past tense (and this fact doesn’t prevent the speakers of these languages from locating actions appropriately in time), some languages lack a dedicated strategy to express reflexivity and this doesn’t prevent the speakers from expressing those situations of coreferentiality. On the opposite side, there are languages in which more than a single morphological strategy is to be used in order to code these situations. In addition, it has to be mentioned that in many cases the borders between the different strategies are diffuse and that the different categories may well be understood more as a continuum than as a clear-cut classification. We will now thus survey the different reflexive strategies existing across languages, as well as the lack-of-strategy and the multiple-strategy systems.
3.1. LACK OF A DEDICATED STRATEGY Despite being very widespread, morphological reflexivity isn’t present in the grammar of all human languages. On the one hand, the disambiguating function which is the main reason for the existence of reflexivity in the first place can be implemented with recourse to systems different from those which we consider under this term. On the other hand, in a way analogous to the case of English’s adnominal possession (see previous example 5)) many languages simply allow ambiguity to occur also between subject and object reference. Regarding other systems that allow disambiguation between different third person referents, proximate/obviative distinctions and the use of logophorics are amongst the 4
By “dedicated strategy” we refer to a grammatical or morphological coding of these reflexive situations different from the rest of transitive sentences with noncoreferential subject and object.
5
most relevant alternatives to reflexivity. Being necessarily brief and crude in this respect, proximate/obviate systems allow the speaker to choose between two different kinds of third person, one of which (the proximate) is established as basic in a certain speech situation while additional third person referents are distinguished by taking the obviative marking. Let’s look at this ambiguous English sentence: 7) Michaeli saw Johnj yesterday but hei/j was so mad at himi/j that hei/j didn’t even stop to say hello In this example we don’t know who was mad at whom; however, a proximate/obviative system would be able to disambiguate sentences such as these in that it would probably establish “Michael” as the topical or basic third person and “John” as the obviative and the proximate or obviative marking of subsequent third person pronouns would allow us to track its referent unambiguously. It is worth noting that if the sentence in (7) would include participants of different genders the sentence would become unambiguous: 8) Michaeli saw Lauraj yesterday but shej was so mad at himi that shej didn’t even stop to say hello Indeed, one could also think of gender as an instrument of languages to track different third person referents since it helps prevent ambiguity in many contexts. The other system different from reflexivity which may occasionally serve this same purpose is, as has been previously mentioned, the use of logophorics. Put in few words5, logophoric pronouns are used in contexts of reported speech to refer back to the person whose speech is reported: 9) Georgei said that hei/j won’t forget about it A language making use of a logophoric distinction in pronouns would be able to disambiguate both readings by using the logophoric pronoun when “he” is to be understood as coreferential with “George”. We have very briefly introduced a few of the morphologized strategies besides reflexivity that natural languages may use to distinguish between different third person referents, however, and as previous examples of English sentences 5) and 6) have already shown, languages are usually quite tolerant with respect to ambiguity. Some 5
For more information on logophoric pronouns see von Roncador (2006)
6
languages are so tolerant in this respect, that they do not even have a grammaticalized strategy at all to systematically disambiguate between coreferential and disjoint reference readings of subject and object. This is an example from Samoan: 10) A fasi ‘o
iai/j ‘e
iai
(from Faltz, 1985:68)
FUT kill ABS 3SG ERG 3SG
“Hei is about to kill himj/himselfi” The reflexive use of (bound) third person pronouns is admittedly infrequent6, probably because of the potential for ambiguity; however, it only constitutes a small step to allow ambiguity in examples such as 10) as well as in cases such as 5) or 6) in which it is very frequent crosslinguistically. At this point I feel necessary to specify that grammatical ambiguity does not automatically result in interpretation problems for the listener/reader of an ambiguous sentence. Context, world knowledge and other clues most frequently make it possible to decide upon the correct reading without much effort. This is probably the reason why languages allow ambiguity in the first place. In addition, languages lacking morphological reflexivity may also occasionally resolve these situations unambiguously in that they may make use of (optional) modifiers or adverbs in the same way as any other languages frequently use them to solve their own contexts of ambiguity. Despite the fact that, as we have seen, not all languages make use of reflexive morphology, it is nonetheless a very widespread strategy. Not only is it widespread, however, it is also internally very diverse in that very different constructions and morphologies involving nouns, pronouns, modifiers and verbs are regarded as reflexive. There have been numerous attempts in the last years to classify reflexive markers (Faltz (1985), Lehmann (2002), König and Kokutani (2006)). Some of them (e.g. Lehmann (2002)) revolve more around diachronic considerations and present a classification of these markers in a scale of increasing grammaticalization whereas others have a more synchronic and structural perspective. I will below analyze briefly the different kinds of reflexive markers following as far as possible a synchronic approach, with a classification based in the word class and syntactic role of the reflexive.
6
Not at all infrequent is the use of normal first and second person object pronouns reflexively, probably as a consequence that such a use may never result in ambiguity. One such example is Spanish: Éli mej lava (nonreflexive) vs. Yoi mei lavo (reflexive)
7
3.2. HEAD REFLEXIVES The first kind of reflexive markers in the classification are those belonging to the word class of substantives and which constitute the head of the object NP (as has been mentioned, the discussion is here limited to core subject-object reflexivity). It is necessary for the argumentation in later chapters to further point out that, whereas some reflexive nouns are limited to these construction, others aren’t. The so-called autophoric nouns have a clear etymology (a meaning of their own with which they are present in other contexts in the language besides reflexive constructions) but are employed with reflexive purposes to stand for the individual of the subject. Nouns meaning “person”, “body”, “head”, “soul” or similar are the most frequently used in these contexts for obvious reasons. This is a clear example from Basque: 11) (Niki)
nire buruai
lurrera bota nuen
(1SG(ERG)) my head(ABS) floor-to throw 1SG(ERG)-3SG(ABS)-PAST
“Ii threw myselfi to the floor” It is worth reminding that, apart from these etymological differences, reflexive noun constructions are syntactically diverse. For example, unlike in Basque, some languages allow for the reflexive to occur in isolation without a possessive pronoun.
3.3. ADJUNCT REFLEXIVES Other reflexive markers are those belonging mainly to the class of modifiers (adjectives, adverbs...) and functioning not as the syntactic head, but rather as adjuncts in the object NP, frequently to a pronoun. Needless to mention due to their adjunct role, these elements are most usually not compulsory (and as such are frequently not regarded as a grammaticalized reflexive strategy) although they may be necessary for a reflexive reading in some languages. Given the somewhat marginal grammatical status of these reflexive expressions and the fact that they overlap to a great extent with the category of intensifiers which I will bring to discussion later, I will limit myself here to mention the category and present an example from Spanish: 12) (Túi)
te
confunde-s (a
2SG(NOM) 2SG(ACU) confuse
tí mismoi) OBJ 2SG same
“Youi get yourselfi wrong” 8
These adjunct expressions are also far from homogeneous; they may or may not for example display agreement with the head noun/pronoun (and may consequently be assigned to different word categories in different languages).
3.4. PRONOMINAL REFLEXIVES Reflexive markers belonging to the word class of pronouns are very common crosslinguistically. Because of their exclusively anaphoric function they usually cannot occur in subject position and present oblique forms exclusively. In this environment, they behave the same as regular object pronouns. As a matter of fact, first and second person reflexives and object pronouns are very frequently the same7 and only the third person has a different form in many languages like for example in German: 13) Er sieht mich (nonreflexive) “He sees me” 14) Eri sieht ihnj (nonreflexive) “Hei sees himj”
Ichi sehe michi (reflexive) “Ii see myselfi” Eri sieht sichi (reflexive) “Hei sees himselfi”
The same as we have mentioned in previous sections, diversity within pronominal reflexives is also the norm. Some languages (like the German example demonstrates) show a person distinction in their reflexive pronouns whereas others don’t. See Russian: 15) Oni vidit sebyai/jegoj v zerkale
Tyi vidish sebyai v zerkale
“Hei sees himselfi/himj in (the) mirror” “Youi see yourselfi in (the) mirror” The most interesting division here, however, is between the pronouns seen so far (which are usually labelled simplex anaphors or se-anaphors) and others which are usually formed from a combination of adjunct (see previous section) and pronoun which are called complex anaphors or self-anaphors. English can serve of course as an example: 16) “He sees me” (object pronoun)
“Ii see myselfi” (reflexive pronoun)
Because of their compositional origin, these reflexives are usually different from regular object pronouns as can be seen in 16). They also tend to have a distribution different from se-anaphors, as the two may be selected by different predicates for example. 7
It could as well be argued that in these cases reflexive forms for the 1 st and 2nd person don’t exist.
9
3.5. VERBAL REFLEXIVES The last reflexive strategy that I will mention is that in which reflexive morphology doesn’t appear in the NP as in the previous example, but in the verb. Because the introverted nature of the action is already morphologically signaled on the verb, the object NP (coreferential with the subject) is most usually omitted: 17) Ja moju sobaku
Ja mojus’
“I wash (the) dog
(Russian)
“I wash (myself)”
The reflexive marking of these verbs may variously be signaled by an independent morpheme added to the transitive verb forms (as in the example above) or may be fused to the person or tense morphemes and therefore not directly derived from the “normal” transitive
verb.
Most
importantly,
however,
is
the
fact
that,
given
this
intransitivizinglike effect of verbal reflexive marking, it is very frequently extended to other non-reflexive meanings. This will be dealt with later more in depth.
3.6. MULTIPLE STRATEGIES As has been already stated, languages frequently employ more than one of the previous reflexive strategies. These are, however, rarely in free variation; they may either account for a difference in meaning or may simply be found in complementary distribution. This is the case for example of Dutch, where different predicates select different anaphors; either se-anaphors or self-anaphors: 18) Oscari schaamt zichi8 (se-anaphor) “Oscar is ashamed”
Oscari haat zichzelfi8 (self-anaphor) “Oscari hates himselfi”
As can be deduced from the examples, typically reflexive verbs (wash, shave, dress, turn...) select the unmarked se-anaphors whereas verbs for actions which are typically directed to others (hate, stab, choose, comfort…) require the marked self-anaphors. According to Kemmer (1993:27) in languages presenting such a double strategy, light strategies are usually used with verbs having a “low distinguishability of participants” whereas marked strategies will be used in the rest of the cases.
8
Taken from Reuland (1999)
10
4. ASSOCIATED CATEGORIES I have previously briefly commented that reflexive markers, by virtue of their diachronic sources (which will be dealt with in the following section) and as a result of extensions of their meaning, often share their morphology with (i.e. are marked in the same way as) certain other categories, which will be briefly reviewed in this section.
4.1. MIDDLE There is such a great diversity of phenomena which have traditionally been labelled “middle” that one could even say that the term has traditionally been a catch-all category for most of the morphological and syntactic strategies which were different from canonical active and passive constructions and/or in some way intermediate between clear one-participant (intransitive) and two-participant (transitive) situations. According to Kemmer (1993), the phenomena generally classified as middle have in common that the initiator of the action (or the subject in any case) is also affected by it (notice the similarity with canonical subject-object reflexives) and that the event has, as she puts it “a low degree of elaboration” by which she means that the different participants or the sub events within it are not clearly distinguished. The middle may have a wider or a narrower scope depending on the language, since the main instrument for delimiting such a heterogeneous category in the first place has traditionally been the sharing of a common morphology. It may maximally cover, under Kemmer’s analysis, categories such as reflexives, reciprocals, body actions, benefactives, logophorics, spontaneous events or passives. An example of an extremely wide middle category is that of Spanish, as evidenced by the wild variety of use of the “se” marker: 19) “Se afeita una vez por semana” (reflexive) 20) “Se compró un coche precioso” (benefactive) 21) “Los forajidos se desafiaban con la mirada” (reciprocal) 22) “Su madre se agachó a recoger los cristales” (body action) 23) “Reduciendo gastos se consigue aumentar el beneficio” (impersonal) 24) “La puerta se cerró con gran estruendo” (spontaneous event) 11
25) “En España se recortan servicios públicos” (passive) 26) “Mario se fue sin decir nada” (aktionsart9) 27) “Le gustaba quejarse constantemente” (deponent10) It is worth noting that, aside from the two last examples, in the rest of the Spanish sentences “se” acts as a kind of valency decreasing derivation on the verb. A transitive verb may evidently be intransitivized by demoting or omitting either the subject (anticausative) or the object (deobjective). These operations are also not far removed from the traditional concept of voice and in fact many languages include the expression of passive or antipassive voice as one of the meaning possibilities of their middle markers. A more detailed account of the reflexive-middle polysemy is presented in the section 5.3 (page 20) which is based on Kazenin (2001)
4.2. INTENSIFIERS Intensifiers are a varied set of expressions whose function is usually to evoke alternatives to their referent. Their meaning usually revolves around the concept of “identity” and is in many languages related (or identical) to words such as “same” or “alone”. As these two words may lead to expect, the so-called intensifiers function syntactically as adjuncts either to a NP (adnominal use) or to a VP (adverbial use)11. A German example will make the meaning contribution of intensifiers clearer: 28) Der König selbst ist gekommen (adnominal use) “The king himself has come” 29) Ich habe das Haus selbst gebaut (adverbial use) “I have built the house myself” The adnominal use, as can be seen, emphasizes that it was the king who came, as opposed to other alternative readings. The adverbial use implies something similar: that 9
With the term “Aktionsart”, also referred to as lexical aspect, we refer to the temporal structure of a verb as an inherent property of it, as opposed to grammatical aspect. Thus, the verb “ir” (go) describes a durative event, whereas “irse” (leave) describes an instantaneous event. 10
Deponent verbs are, in classical languages, those exhibiting an active meaning but passive or middle voice conjugation and which lack the underived (active) verb forms. In a similar way, many Spanish “pronominal verbs” lack a nonpronominal equivalent; thus, we have “quejarse” but not “quejar”. 11
For a more detailed account of the meanings and uses of intensifiers see König (2001)
12
it was me who built the house and no other; therefore it is almost like saying “alone”. The main difference between these intensifier adjuncts and any other typical modifiers is that they are (surprisingly for a word which behaves almost like an adjective or adverb) almost referential and indeed coreferential with an antecedent. Thus, it would be difficult to oppose a co-indexation of “king” and “himself” in (28) or of “I” and “myself” in (29); In spite of the fact that the intensifiers occupy nonargumental positions in these sentences and despite modifiers not being in principle referential expressions, they do refer to the same entity as their antecedents here. Apart from this unique property, they also show an idiosyncratic syntactic distribution, different in its adnominal use from both adjectives and nouns: they may be adjuncts to pronouns (unlike adjectives), see (30) but they cannot (unlike nouns or pronouns) occupy an argument position, see (31): 30) Er selbst ist gekommen “He himself has come” 31) *Selbst hat das Hause gebaut “*Himself has built the house”
*Er traurig ist gekommen “*He sad has come” Er hat das Haus gebaut “He has built the house”
As we have seen, some properties of the previous words could well support their inclusion in a word class of their own. Intensifiers, however, are a heterogeneous category crosslinguistically. In the previous German sentences and their English translations, we can see, for example, that “selbst” is an invariable word whereas English intensifiers show person and number agreement. Both intensifiers also differ in their possibilities for syntactic combination: 32) Sie hat ihn selbst gesehen (German: adjunct to object pronoun allowed) “*She has seen him himself”
(English: adjunct to object pronoun not allowed)
Despite the differences, intensifiers across languages also share some common properties. As König (2006) points out, they are always prosodically stressed and focused and always function as adjuncts and not as arguments. Their semantic coreferential contribution to the sentence is also one of their core characteristics; a property they share, as may have been noticed, with reflexive pronouns. Such a semantic proximity accounts for the fact that, in many languages, intensifiers and reflexive pronouns are identical (this is the reason why I have included intensifiers as a
13
category related to reflexivity) and very frequently the first are a diachronic source for the second (see self-anaphors on page 9). English is one such example: 33) The president himself has no idea what to do (intensifier) 34) The president saw himself in the mirror (reflexive pronoun) We have just seen that reflexives are in many languages identical to intensifiers and in the previous section we saw that the same strategy was used in many languages to express reflexivity and other derived intransitivity (middle) situations. It is interesting to point out, however, that no language conflates the three categories: a)
[Intensifiers
Reflexives]
Derived intrans.
(English “-self”)
b)
Intensifiers
[Reflexives
Derived intrans.]
(Spanish “se”)
Reflexives
Derived intrans.]12 (Unattested)
c) * [Intensifiers
4.3. RECIPROCALS Another example of the polyfunctionality13 that very frequently characterizes reflexive markers is the frequent sharing of strategy with reciprocals despite the fact that they denote very different situations: Reciprocal situations like “John and Laura love one another” incorporate, unlike reflexives, at least two different actions “John loves Laura” and “Laura loves John” and at least two participants and may be expressed by their respective component clauses in all languages. For economy reasons, however, reciprocity is most often expressed by single-clause constructions, often polysemous with the reflexive. This is an example from German: 35) Sie hassen sich
from König and Gast (2008:171)
“They hate themselves/each other” Despite the important difference in some contexts such as this, the two interpretations are often mutually exclusive, as the meaning of the verb or the context will most frequently clarify the meaning, and because ambiguity can only occur with plural referents (reciprocity is in principle impossible unless there is more than a single 12
Adapted from König and Siemund (1999:61)
13
For concrete numbers and a more extensive explanation of the reflexive-reciprocal polysemy see Maslova (2013)
14
individual involved). In addition, reciprocals and reflexives share some important traits, the most important of which is that they tend to show the same syntactic behaviour (and they are frequently treated on a par in syntactic theories), they have valency-reducing effects on verbs and their subject is agent/experiencer and patient/theme at the same time. This explains that they frequently share a single strategy and that reflexive marking usually extends to reciprocity.
4.4. LOGOPHORICS Logophorics, as was briefly introduced on page 6, are special pronouns used in reported speech situations that refer to an antecedent in the main clause, thus disambiguating its referent. See this example from Finnish: 36) Sei sano, ettei
häni/sej voi tulla14
3SG say COMP:NEG LOG/3SG can come
“He/shei says that he/shei/j won’t be able to come” Logophoric pronouns have much in common with long distance reflexives (which are frequently also labelled “logophorics” by many authors). These can be defined as anaphors that can find their antecedent outside their minimal governing category, thus disobeying principle A) of the binding theory (see page 3). As a consequence, they also indicate a necessary coreferentiality with some element of a higher clause. This is an example from Chinese: 37) Zhangsani renwei Lisij zhidao Wangwuk xihuan zijii/j/k15 “Zhangsan thinks Lisi knows Wangwu likes self” Be they the same phenomenon or be they different, the main point I want to present here is that there are anaphors (which may in other contexts be bound locally) which also have the faculty of being locally free. Because of this, long distance reflexives or logophorics could well be considered as a category different from both pronouns and anaphors but sharing frequently the same morphological strategy with reflexive pronouns and deriving from them. 14
Taken from Nau (2006)
15
From Cole et al. (2001)
15
5. DIACHRONIC DEVELOPMENTS IN REFLEXIVITY The different reflexive strategies and their patterns of polysemy have been subject up to this point to an overwhelmingly synchronic analysis. One of the most important unifying elements between these, however, is diachronic in origin. The various reflexive strategies, as well as reflexivity itself and its related categories are linked by a grammaticalization channel, as some are a frequent historical source or outcome of others. I will in this section pursue this diachronic perspective.
5.1. THE GRAMMATICALIZATION PROCESS Since we have introduced the concept of grammaticalization, it seems only logical to explain it briefly. It needs to be stated, even if this is obvious, that languages differ strikingly in their “grammars”; for instance, in which categories are obligatory or optional. Regarding number, for example, in some languages such as English it is compulsory to distinguish singular (one entity) from plural (more than one entity) in nouns. In others such as Chinese, it is not, and thus, number is not a grammaticalized category (it does not belong in the grammar of the language). Grammaticalization is, therefore, the diachronic process16 whereby independent or optional linguistic elements become an obligatory part of the grammar. In this respect, the (very) general evolution of linguistic elements has been outlined as follows: lexical word > function word > clitic > affix > loss
(at the word level)
The transitions between the different stages are of course blurry and different processes play a role: semantic bleaching (loss of the semantic content of a word), morphological reduction (loss of previous morphological distinctions), phonetic erosion (the word becomes unstressed, it is shortened…), obligatorification (variability is reduced)… Grammaticalization may also occur in different word categories (in nouns, verbs…) or at different levels (at the word level or at the phrase level).
16
Even if some authors defend that grammaticalization is alike a yes/no parameter in that a particular category either belongs or does not belong in the grammar of a language, it is clear that the majority view (the one that understands it as a progressive change) is vastly more fruitful in that it may account for the diversity displayed by languages (there are still other languages in which number is obligatory in some contexts and optional in others) and offers room for the investigation of diachronic change.
16
5.2. DIACHRONIC DEVELOPMENTS IN REFLEXIVITY The different crosslinguistic strategies to express reflexivity which were presented on page 8 form part of a grammaticalization channel whose diachronic development follows basically the same order as the one in which they appear in that previous section. The less grammaticalized reflexive strategy is, therefore, that of a head reflexive in which a noun with the meaning of person, body, head… appears in the object position along with a possessive modifier coreferential with the subject. This was the situation reflected in our Basque example (11). This is another example from Fula: 38) Mi
nawnii
hoore am
(Jungraithmayr and Abu-Manga 1988: 163)
1SG wound:PERF head 1SG:POSS
“I wounded myself/my head” In reflexive constructions, the noun is interpreted to stand for the person of the subject; otherwise it still denotes the original item. At this stage, several innovations (in line with those processes submerged under the wider term “grammaticalization” which were introduced in the previous section) may introduce some differences between the reflexive construction and other similar constructions involving a body part and a possessor: it may come to lack number distinctions (morphological reduction), may omit the possessor, may become more rigid syntactically than other noun phrases in object position… This is an example from Bari: 39) Nye rerem mugun He
kill
(Spagnolo 1933: 139f.)
body
“He kills himself” The construction may further become limited to (and compulsory in) reflexive uses (obligatorification) or the original semantic content of the word may be lost (semantic bleaching). This may eventually lead to the conversion of the original autophoric noun (head reflexive) into a dedicated reflexive noun or into a fully-fledged reflexive pronoun. The same general process we have outlined for head reflexives is also valid for adjunct reflexives: First of all, they usually derive from the same semantic sources (person, body, head...). Similarly, as the adjuncts become increasingly obligatory, they may ultimately become reflexive pronouns, usually by the fusion of pronoun and adjunct. 17
Reflexive pronouns, however, may be not only the goal, but also the source of the grammaticalization process within reflexive categories. In some languages, reflexive pronouns have the status of an independent word (may be accented, may appear in different syntactic contexts…). The German reflexive is such an example: 40) Hat er sich schwer verletzt?
Er hat sich verletzt
Has he himself seriously hurt
He has himself hurt
“Has he hurt himself seriously?”
“He has hurt himself”
41) Sich zu verletzen ist nicht gut Oneself to
hurt
is
not good
“It’s not good to hurt oneself”
Verletzt er sich nicht? hurt
he himself not
“Doesn’t he hurt himself?”
“Sich” behaves in the same way as any noun phrase such as “den Hund” (the dog) or “Michael” as evidenced from the fact that the reflexive pronoun could be substituted by them in these examples to form grammatical sentences. Pronouns, however, are frequently cliticized, losing stress and coming to occur in rigid positions (usually adjacent to their verbs), the pronouns of the Romance languages constituting a well know example. If every trace of independence is lost, reflexive pronouns may eventually become reflexive affixes on the verb. Such is the situation of Russian, where we find a reflexive affix stemming from a reflexive pronoun (see examples 15 and 17). There are historically attested instances of linguistic change between most or all of these stages which I shall not present here for lack of space17. From the examples of European languages alone it could well be deduced that when grammaticalization in reflexivity has progressed all the way up to a reflexive pronoun or an affix, the etymology (semantic source) of the item is no longer recoverable in the synchronic system (thus throwing some uncertainty on the viability of this grammaticalization process as a whole). There are, however, attested historical examples which account for the whole process as some languages show a verbal reflexive derived from a lexical word meaning “body”. It is worth mentioning, however, that the grammaticalization process is a generalization and therefore it is not required or even expected that words pass through all the stages. Other sources for reflexive pronouns or reflexive verbal morphology as well as other outcomes of head and adjunct reflexives are by no means excluded. 17
For attested examples of these transitions please see Lehmann (2002).
18
5.3. DIACHRONIC DEVELOPMENTS IN ASSOCIATED CATEGORIES In the previous chapter, the diachronic relationship holding between the different possible reflexive strategies has been surveyed. In the present section, a wider perspective will be adopted in order to explore which (nonreflexive) categories give rise to reflexivity in general and which other categories arise in turn from reflexivity. In the same way as when talking about reflexive pronouns we argued that these were neither the beginning nor the endpoint of the grammaticalization process within reflexivity, we can also regard reflexivity as an intermediate category in a wider grammaticalization chain. A reflexive strategy can arise of course directly out of the increasing use of a certain noun (body, head…) to denote the “self” (autophoric) and its obligatorification in reflexive contexts as is already implied in the previous section. The category of intensifiers (whose etymology is also often related to the same nouns)18 also lies often in the origin of a reflexive strategy. As was seen on page 13, intensifiers function syntactically as adjunts either to NPs or to VPs. Given their semantic contribution (the expression of identity, evoking of alternatives which are, however, to be discarded…) and their syntactic behavior (they may also attach to pronouns) it is logical that such intensifiers frequently come to be used alongside pronouns to emphasize a particular exclusive reading of their referent. In the case of the vast majority of verbs, disjoint reference is the expected situation and therefore coreferentiality of subject and object is the most unexpected reading for the object pronoun and the one which may therefore require a corresponding marking. Intensifier expressions constitute the most immediate candidate for such a marking by virtue of their semantic and syntactic properties. For the adoption of the intensifier as a marking of reflexivity, first of all its pragmatic interpretation as a marking of coreferentiality has to become dominant over (and ultimately displace) other possible readings in the same context and secondly it needs to become obligatory when expressing such a coreferential reading. Such a process would lead up to an adjunct reflexive; that is, to a reflexive strategy in which the object NP is
18
For a more complete treatment of the etymological sources of intensifiers and reflexives see König et al. (2013).
19
composed of the object pronoun as the head and the intensifier as an adjunct. This is an example from Malayalam: 42) Avan avane ta he
him
e u appeʈutti (Asher and Kumari 1997: 162)
INT
accuse.PST
“He accused himself” 43) ɲaan ta I
(Reflexive)
e atə ceyyaam
INT
it
do.FUT
“I myself will do it”
(Intensifier)
Further grammaticalization of this adjunct reflexive strategy to a fully-fledged reflexive pronoun may proceed via the deletion of the original syntactical head (since the object is already indicated to be coreferential with the subject by the intensifier) or via the fusion of pronoun and intensifier into a single lexical item. During the whole process, however, the preexisting intensifier and the later-arising reflexive strategy may remain identical, which is the reason why intensifiers and reflexivity share the same morphological strategy in many languages. However, as we already advanced in section 4, not only is reflexivity an endpoint of diachronic grammaticalization processes but also, and maybe primarily, a source for them, in that the morphological or grammatical strategy originally aimed at expressing reflexivity may extend to various other categories. The category of reflexivity, in which the subject acts upon itself, conflates two crucial characteristics: first of all, there is only one participant in the action, even if the verb itself is otherwise transitive, secondly, the subject is not only the agent, but is also affected by the action. These two properties are the main ones to explain the frequent extension of the reflexive morphology to other categories and circumstances. Because of the aforementioned intransitivizing effect on transitive verbs and the fact that the subject is affected by the verbal action, reflexive morphology often is extended to anticausative contexts, in which the subject, however, is no longer an agent as was in reflexive contexts: 44) Er wäscht sich (Reflex.) “He washes (himself)”
Das Fenster öffnet sich (Anticausat.) “The window opens (itself)”
20
On a later development, the strategy may as well be extended to passive contexts, whose only difference with the anticausative is that there is again an agent involved which is, however, different from the subject and is either unexpressed or included optionally in adjunct position: 45) El vaso se rompió (anticausative)
La casa se construyó (passive)
the glass REF break.PAS
the house REF build.PAS
“The glass broke”
“The house was built”
Another possible development is the adoption of the reflexive strategy also for impersonal sentences which are no longer intransitivized sentences but are rather characterized by having an indefinite subject (be it present or not) or a general reading: 46) Se insultó a varios políticos
Se debe invertir con prudencia (impers.)
REF insult.PAS OBJ some politicians
REF must invest.INF with prudence
“Several politicians were insulted” “One must invest cautiously” In the extension of the reflexive to the anticausative and the passive, the verb has become intransitive by eliminating or demoting to a nonargumental position the original subject of the transitive verb. The conversion of a transitive verb to an intransitive can of course also be achieved by the demotion or elision of the object (even if this strategy is less common) in which case we have to talk about deobjective (no object) or antipassive (demoted object). The reflexive strategy is also used in those intransitivizing operations as the following Russian example conveys: 47) On roj-et
zeml-iu
He dig-s (the) earth.ACC
“He is digging the ground”
On roj-et-sja v zeml-e (Geniusiene, 1987: 9,56) He dig-s-REF in earth.LOC
“He is digging in the ground”
Not too frequent, but far from rare, are the interactions between reflexivity and lexical aspect (Aktionsart). In some languages, the use of the reflexive strategy may be used to express a perfective aspect. This might be explained if one takes into account that one of the bases of reflexivity is the affectedness of the subject, which can arguably only take place if the action itself is completed. Such a difference in lexical aspect is responsible for the combinatory limitations of the following Spanish verb pairs:
21
48)
49)
Juan bebió agua
*Juan se bebió agua
John drink.PAS water
John REF drink.PAS wate
Juan se fue
*Juan fue
John REF go.PAS
John go.PAS
Another sometimes encountered meaning extension of the reflexive morphology is the potential. The mechanisms for this change are too complex to be explained here19, but there is both synchronic and diachronic evidence suggesting there is a firm link between aspect and modality. Let’s see again a Russian and a Spanish example: 48) Detj-am ne spit-sja
(Kazenin, 2001)
Children-DAT no sleeps-REF
“The children cannot go to sleep”
¡No se tiran los juguetes! no REF throw the toys
“You must not throw the toys!”
A last category which often features the reflexive strategy is that of deponent verbs; those verbs which present a reflexive conjugation but don’t have any associated nonreflexive counterpart and where consequently the reflexive marking cannot be associated to any derivational process but merely forms part of their lexical entry. It is, however, worth noticing, that frequently the same kind of verbs appears as deponent crosslinguistically: those that denote actions (such as wash, dress, sit down…) in which the initiator of the action is also affected by it (notice the similarity with the reflexive). Along with the above mentioned constellation of possible derivational uses of the reflexive, there is another category to which reflexive morphology is often extended by virtue of the agent-and-patient role of reflexive subjects. In a reciprocal situation such as “John and Mary saw each other in the cinema” both participants are both seeing and being seen, which is exactly the same as in a reflexive like “they saw themselves”. Syntactically they also both work as intransitivizers20. The similarity between both is therefore clear. The originally reflexive-only marking may start to be assigned reciprocal readings when occurring with plural subjects (otherwise reciprocity is impossible) even in the presence of a specific reciprocal strategy in the language. The following English fragment shows that in some contexts reciprocity and reflexivity are difficult to distinguish: 19
For information on the subject see Leiss (2008)
20
Note, however, that reciprocity may also be expressed without intransitivization either by overtly stating the two transitive sentences within: “John saw Mary and Mary saw John”; or by keeping one of the transitive sentences and adding a reciprocal expression: “John saw Mary and vice versa”.
22
49) but with increasing affluence and equality, most blac people (…) began calling themselves African-Americans in the same way as Americans of Irish ancestry call themselves Irish-Americans. (Maslova, 2008) Starting with those contexts, reciprocity may establish as one of the possible meanings of the reflexive strategy and, depending on the meaning of the predicate, the reciprocal interpretation may even oust the reflexive (in the so-called symmetric predicates such as “kiss”, “fight” or “marry”). There are attested examples of this diachronic extension; for example, “se” could only be used for reflexivity in Latin but is nowadays used also for reciprocity in Spanish. As the last of the categories which often shares a morphological strategy with reflexivity we mentioned at the beginning of this paper the category of logophoricity. In the same way as reflexivity had intransitivization and an affected subject as the main commonalities with some of the above mentioned categories (autocausative, passive and reciprocal), logophorics’ and reflexivity’s common ground is that they both allow the tracking of referents by signaling some referential expression as coreferential with a previous one. The only difference is that reflexivity (at least in our established core case) signals coreferentiality of subject and object within the same clause, whereas logophoricity may apply between expressions in different clauses and not necessarily between subject and object. There is little agreement regarding what phenomena are to be regarded as logophoricity; however, the formal identity of reflexive and logophoric pronouns in some languages leads to postulate a diachronic relation between both. A first step might be taken when, in some particular contexts, a reflexive strategy is allowed to spring a clause boundary. This development is exemplified by Icelandic: 50) Joni sagði þeim að Maríaj elski sigi Jon told
(Baker (2008))
them that Maria loves REF
“Jon told them that Maria loved him” 51) Hann sagðist ekki lesa bókina21 he
said.REF no read.INF book
“He said that he didn’t read the book” 21
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_grammar. Accessed on 17/03/2014.
23
Icelandic’s both reflexive constructions (reflexive pronoun and reflexive verb) originate from Germanic “normal” reflexive pronoun “sik” but have both developed, as can be seen from the examples, long-distance uses. A further step towards logophoricization could be to allow the otherwise reflexive pronoun to occur in a wider range of contexts such as subject as well as object positions, which is seen in the previous Finnish example 36) or to no longer allow its reflexive, clause internal use.
5.4. SEMANTIC MAP OF REFLEXIVITY AND ASSOCIATED CATEGORIES In a semantic map, functionally related categories are represented. A semantic map may have both a synchronic and a diachronic reading. On the one hand, synchronically, it makes the prediction that it is (generally)22 only adjacent categories that may in a particular language share the same morphological or grammatical strategy. On the other hand, diachronically, it may represent the paths or direction of language change. The following is a tentative map which represents, according to the insights of Lehmann (2002), Kazenin (2001) and Kemmer (1993) among others, the patterns of change both within reflexivity (in the central square) and between reflexivity and other categories (outside the square) that have appeared in this section: Logophorics
Autoph. nouns
Head reflex.
“person”, “body”, “head”…
Reflex. pron. Intensif.
Adjunct reflex.
Anticaus.
Passive
Deobject ...
Antipass .
Reflex. verb
Reciprocal
22
There is always of course the possibility of an intruding new form disrupting a previous adjacency or of two grammatical markers coming to be identical by chance.
24
On the other hand, a simplified version of the semantic map may help visualize the polyfunctionality of reflexive strategies in different languages (the shaded functions are those which may be covered by the marker in question):
Logoph.
Anticaus Intens.
Icelandic verbal reflexive “-st”
Russian verbal reflexive “-sya”
Logoph. Anticaus
Passive Intens.
Reflex. Deobj.
Passive
Reflex. Deobj.
Antipass
Antipass
Recipr.
Recipr.
6. THE CASE OF ENGLISH The history of English provides a very interesting and well documented example of one of the aforementioned language changes related to reflexivity, namely of the emergence of a reflexive strategy out of an intensifier.
6.1. OLD ENGLISH The situation in Old English is that of a language without a dedicated strategy. The reflexive pronoun which German sich, Spanish se or Russian sebya have inherited from their Proto-Indo-European ancestor had disappeared from the language by the time of its earliest records. Reflexivity in Old English was expressed simply by means of the normal object pronouns for all persons, a strategy which is quite infrequent but not unattested crosslinguistically. Here I present two examples of reflexively used (bound) object pronouns in Old English quoted from van Gelderen (2000): 52) Þa behydde Adami hinei
(Genesis 3.9)
And hide.PAS Adam 3SG.ACC
“And Adam hid himself” 53) No ici mei an herewæsmun hnagran talige guþgeweorca, þonne Grendelj hinej 23 No 1SG 1SG.ACC on prowess smaller consider
wardeeds
than
Grendel 3SG.ACC
“I think of myself for prowess and wardeeds no less than Grendel of himself”
23
(Beowulf, 677-8)
25
In addition, and much in the same way as is still the case in modern German, we find a word “sylf-” (a similar “selb-” in German) with a double function; on the one hand, it can function in both languages as an adjective meaning “same”, as this example quoted from van Gelderen (2000) shows:
54) Ac ne eart þu se sylfa god, þe us swa drife?
(The Paris Psalter 59.9)
But no be.2SG you the same god who us so drive.3SG
“Are you not the same god who guides us so?” Aber bist du nicht der selbe Gott, der uns so führt? On the other hand, it could perform the role of an intensifier, whose functions and semantics have already been explained. It could in these contexts variously function as an adjunct of subjects, of objects (a function which gains popularity in the later part of the Old English period), of prepositional phrases etc. German translations are included to illustrate the similarity of the modern German intensifier to its Old English cognate: 55) þæt þu ... lete Suð-Dene sylfe geweorðan guðe wið Grendel that you … let
Danes
self-NOM.PL fight
against
(Beowulf 1995)
Grendel
“that you let the Danes themselves fight against Grendel” Dass du Dänen selbst gegen Grendel kämpfen lässt
56) Judas hine
sylfne
aheng
(quoted from Peitsara, 1997)
Judas 3SG.ACC self.ACC.SG hang.PAS
“Judas hanged himself“ Judas hängte sich selbst One cannot fail to notice the enormous similarity of this last combination of pronoun and intensifier in 56) with the current use of the reflexive pronoun and this is indeed arguably its origin. There is, however, as Gast (2006) points out, no agreement (or not enough information) concerning whether some typically other-directed verbs (mainly violent events such as “kill”, “destroy” or “hang”) had to include compulsorily an object with “self” to allow a reflexive reading. In any case, as has been shown by the examples, reflexivity (expressed by the object pronouns) was in Old English a strategy different from the intensifier and largely independent of one another. 26
It is in any case not difficult to intuitively understand why it may be these previously mentioned other-directed verbs that need to explicitly mark those situations of coreferentiality more urgently, since it is in them that this is more unexpected and is thus worth specifying, or otherwise a disjoint reference will be the easiest reading24. The semantic content of the intensifier (especially in a language like Old English in which it also means “same”) makes it an ideal candidate to perform such a reflexive marking role. The concrete mechanisms for the subsequent grammaticalization process affecting these pronoun + intensifier combinations are not clear (various competing theories exist) and belong in any case in the Middle English period.
6.2. MIDDLE ENGLISH The situation at the beginning of the Middle English period, as Rissanen (1999) points out, is the inherited from Old English: Even if the use of “self” becomes progressively more frequent, the anaphoric (bound) use of object personal pronouns is still present: 57) He cladde hym as a poure laborer
(quoted from Peitsara, 1997)
“He dressed (himself) as a poor laborer” We find the use of “self” in reflexively used personal pronouns of typically otherdirected actions, (violent or undesirable actions, desirable actions most frequently directed to others…) much in line with Old English: 58) ðat tu ðe seluen ne haddest betere iholpen
(quoted from Peitsara, 1997)
“That you had not helped yourself better” Middle English reflexivity thus, is similar to the situation we find currently in Dutch (see example 18) or almost identical to the one we find in the closely related Frisian. Two reflexive strategies can be distinguished: a simple one (represented by the reflexive use of personal object pronouns) in use with predicates denoting typically self-directed actions and a marked one (the use of the reflexive self-pronouns) in use with typically other-directed actions. The system will remain more or less stable (albeit with a certain
24
Note, however, that some authors (van Gelderen) assign little or no importance to the necessity for disambiguation as a factor explaining the emergence of English reflexive pronouns.
27
extension of the self-strategy to other types of verbs such as those of self-care) up to the end of the Middle English period. The morphological changes affecting the self-strategy which are related to its process of grammaticalization into a reflexive pronoun would start much earlier however. From the thirteenth century onwards, “self” apparently comes to be reanalyzed as a noun, probably as a consequence of the disappearance of adjective endings, and the reflexive expression is consequently reanalyzed syntactically as a head reflexive. This explains the change of the first and second person pronouns (starting in the singular and later extended to the plural) in these constructions from object (59) to possessive (60): 59) her ich sette þe an hond. me seoluen and mi kine-lond (Caligula 11309)25 60) ich sette þe her an hond. mi-seolfe and myn kinelond
(Otto 11309)24
“here I place you in hand. Myself and my kingly lands” This first change (of first and second person singular) has, however, sometimes also been explained as a purely phonetic change, with the plural forms following by analogy. It is interesting to notice that the new head reflexive extended to the first and second person but the old adjunct reflexive was preserved in the third person, at least in Standard English26. The third person frequently behaves in a way different from the first and second crosslinguistically and this is, thus, not a totally unexpected development. Also probably related to the transfer of “self” to the category of noun is the generalization of the plural forms in -s (“ourselves”, “yourselves” and themselves”) towards the end of the Middle English period (although this is as well not universal): 61) that do turne them selfe about…
(Peitsara, Boethius 107)
62) those who have accustomed themselves… (Peitsara, Tillotson, Sermons II:ii 428) Although subject to language-independent and variable orthographic conventions, we observe in these examples in addition, that throughout the Middle English period the possessive or object pronouns and the intensifier “self” are with increasing frequency
25
Quoted from van Gelderen (2000)
26
Some contemporary varieties of English (e.g. Southern USA) do show a uniform paradigm with “hisself” and “theirselves” and these analogizing tendencies were found as well in Middle English.
28
written together, which hints at a process of univerbation (the diachronic combining of two or more words into a single one) under way: 63) And Jhesus bowide hym silf doun… (Peitsara, The New Testament John 8 8) 64) he gaf him-selven ranscun
(Peitsara, Cursor Mundi 1244)
65) he wol gnappe himself (Peitsara, A Late Middle English Treatise on Horses 89) A grammatical phenomenon which demands attention because of its connection to reflexivity is the possibility of eliding the object of a verb. This faculty of Middle English is indeed inherited from Old English, which could elide verb arguments with great freedom when these were recoverable from the context. In the case of reflexive objects (which is the interesting trait regarding the present paper) they could still be elided in Middle English: 66) & wrynge þe jeuse in a bacyn & do it in þe sonne to drye27 There was, however, also the possibility to include the pronoun (either the simple object pronoun or the reflexive) as the following examples of the beginning of the Modern English Period show: 67) At length out comes Jack dropping dry, and goes to get fire to dry him28 68) And I may repaire to the towne… to warme and dry my selfe29 The variability shown by these examples has persisted with certain self-directed verbs until present-day English, were, as Peitsara (1997) points out, all “wash”, “wash me” and “wash myself” are attested across dialects. In standard usage, the elided object has become the norm in these verbs, although some contexts (disambiguation, emphasis…) may permit the reflexive pronoun to appear.
27
“Liber de Diversis Medicinis” in the Thornton Manuscript 10 (Quoted from Peitsara, 1997)
28
Armin, “A Nest of Ninnies” 14 (Quoted from Peitsara, 1997)
29
Harman, “A Caveat or Warening for Commen Cursetors” 69 (Quoted from Peitsara, 1997)
29
6.3. MODERN ENGLISH Regardless of the changes I have already presented (word category change of “self” which becomes a noun, univerbation of object pronoun and intensifier to form emphatic reflexives or extension and obligatorification in some contexts of the self-strategy) the most radical changes in reflexivity still had to take place. We refer on the one hand to the disappearance of bound object pronouns (since we know that in present-day English nonreflexive pronouns cannot be bound in their minimal governing category (see Principle B of the Binding Theory in page 3)) and to the disappearance of the monomorphemic intensifier “self” from the language (since in contemporary English the intensifiers are also of the complex form pronoun+self). Both these changes took place at the beginning of the Modern English period. Examples of the replacement of the monomorphemic intensifier “self” by the modern bi-morphemic forms start to appear well back into 13th century Middle English (69) but this was not uniform and the monomorphemic intensifier would survive into later stages of Middle English (70) and in different dialects (71) and will not disappear completely until the Modern English period. 69) low, god himself seið þurh ðe prophete 70) ðe most kyd knyȝteȝ vnder Krystes seluen 71) Or for-þi þat he self wrought All thinges
(Hali Meiðhad, 247) (Gawain, 51) (Cursor Mundi, Cotton, 311-2)
Regarding the disappearance of bound object pronouns, this takes place (unlike in the previous case) more rapidly between the end of the Middle English and the beginning of the Modern English period. Already in the Paston Letters of the 15th century, reflexive pronouns are used in most bound contexts (72) and only what van Gelderen (2000) calls “inherently reflexive” verbs may appear with a bound object pronoun (73): 72) ho so euer schuld dwelle at Paston shulde have nede to conne defende hymselfe (Paston Letters, 14) 73) he shall repente hym
(Paston Letters, 143)
Some last sparse testimonies of reflexively used object pronouns are found as late as Shakespeare (74) but leave no trace in later stages: 74) I feele me much to blame
(Henry IV, II, iv) 30
With the above mentioned processes, the present-day system of English comes into being; the use of locally free object pronouns (75) and locally bound reflexive pronouns (76) which are morphologically complex and identical to the intensifiers (77). 75) Hei likes himj a lot 76) Hei likes himselfi a lot 77) He himself likes spaghetti a lot The reflexive system of present-day English is, however, not without its complications. There are some contexts in which both a reflexive pronoun and an object pronoun may appear grammatically (78) whereas according to the binding theory they should in principle be in complementary distribution. In some other similar contexts, however, a reflexive is not allowed (79): 78) Tomi found a wallet beside himi/j/himselfi 79) I don’t have any money on me/*myself right now On the other hand, the reflexive pronouns may appear in contexts were they are locally free (seemingly defying again the binding theory): 80) Jemima wasn’t quite sure whether he meant Cloë or herself
König (2002)
Another interesting feature is the frequent elision of reflexive pronouns with verbs of self-care (which are typically self-directed): 81) Mary washed and dressed smartly Some complications such as the last one may be seen to derive from older stages of the language in which an object could be left out when context already made it clear. Example (80) (locally free reflexives) may be seen as a modern development derived from the bi-morphemic nature of reflexive pronouns. Contexts such as (78) or (79) may be seen as conflict cases between the need for reference disambiguation within the same clause and the inherited system. A detailed analysis of present-day English reflexivity is, however, beyond the scope of the present paper.
31
7 CONCLUSION This study has shown that the linguistic phenomenon of reflexivity is an extremely complex one. On the one hand, as a reference-tracking system, it is related to other phenomena (proximate/obviate distinctions or logophoricity). On the other hand, and even after delimiting the scope of the present paper to the study of coreferentiality situations between subject and object, the crosslinguistic diversity remains extraordinary. What makes reflexivity still more interesting is that, as has been pointed out in this paper, it very frequently shares the same morphology with other phenomena such as intensifiers, reciprocals or a myriad of valency-reducing or voice-changing strategies. This paper has presented the crosslinguistic diversity of reflexive strategies and morphology and has shown how the frequent polysemy of reflexive markers is the result of some frequent diachronic linguistic changes. It has been explained how the category of intensifiers constitutes, because of its semantics and combinatorial properties, a frequent origin of reflexive morphology. The well-attested emergence of English reflexive pronouns has been used to illustrate the multiple faces and implications of such a development and can at the same time make us realize that, even in the presence of extensive written testimonies, it is difficult to agree on the details of the process, which speaks volumes about its inner complexity. On the other hand, it has also been shown that, by virtue of the intransitivizing character of the reflexive (there is only a single participant which is both subject and object) and the affected-entity status of the subject, reflexive morphology often comes to be used as intransitivizing morphology (anticausative or deobjective) or in voice-changing operations (passive or antipassive). Other frequent changes involve the extension of the reflexive morphology to perfective and potential uses, although these changes, unlike previous ones, tend to be lexically conditioned. In addition, as has been explained, reflexive morphology often extends to reciprocal (because of the many shared characteristics between both) and to logophoric contexts when, as a mark for coreferentiality, the reflexive is able to override clause boundaries. All in all, reflexivity has been shown to be diachronically both an outcome and a source of language change, a fact which has been captured in a diachronic semantic map of reflexivity itself and its related categories. Further work (historical examples, language comparison…) may be needed to test the validity of the proposed semantic map. 32
8 BIBLIOGRAPHY Asher, R. E. and T. C. Kumari. 1997. Malayalam. London: Routledge. Baker, Mark C. 2008. The Syntax of Agreement and Concord. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cole, Peter et al. 2001. “Grammatical and Discourse Conditions on Long Distance Reflexives in two Chinese Dialects”. Syntax and Semantics-Volume 33. Eds. Peter Cole et al. London: Academic Press. 1-49. Gast, Volker. 2006. The Grammar of Identity. Intensifiers and Reflexives in Germanic Languages. London: Routledge. Geniusiene, Emma. 1987. “The typology of reflexives”. Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 2. Eds. Georg Bossong et el. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kemmer, Suzanne. 1993. The Middle Voice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kazenin, Konstantin I. 2001. “Verbal reflexives and the middle voice”. Language Typology and Language Universals-Tome 2. Eds. Martin Haspelmath et al. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 916-927. König, Ekkehard. 2001. “Intensifiers and reflexive pronouns”. Language Typology and Language Universals-Tome 1. Eds. Martin Haspelmath et al. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 747-759. König, Ekkehard. 2006. “Intensifiers”. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Ed. Keith Brown et al. London: Elsevier. 718-721. König, Ekkehard and Peter Siemund. 1999. “Intensifiers and reflexives: a typological perspective”. Reflexives: Forms and Functions (Typological studies in language, 40) Ed. Zygmunt Frajzyngier. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 41-74. König, Ekkehard and Volker Gast. 2002. "Reflexive pronouns and other uses of self-forms in English". Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 50.3: 1-14. König, Ekkehard and Volker Gast. 2008. Reciprocals and Reflexives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 33
König, Ekkehard, Peter Siemund and Stephan Töpper. 2013. “Intensifiers and Reflexive Pronouns”. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Eds. Matthew S. Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/47) Lehmann, Christian. 2002. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. 2nd Edition. Erfurt: Arbeitspapiere des Seminars für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Erfurt. Leiss, Elisabeth. 2008. “The silent and aspect-driven patterns of deonticity and epistemicity (A chapter in diachronic typology)”. Modality-aspect Interfaces (Implications and typological solutions). Eds. Werner Abraham and Elisabeth Leiss. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 15-41. Maslova, Elena and Vladimir P. Nedjalkov. 2013. “Reciprocal Constructions”. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Eds. Matthew S. Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/106) Maslova, Elena. 2008. “Reflexive encoding of reciprocity”. Reciprocals and Reflexives. Eds. Ekkehard König and Volker Gast. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 225-258. Nau, Nicole. 2006. “Out of Africa: Logophoric pronouns and reported discourse in Finnish and High Latvian dialects”. Acta Linguistica Lithuanica. Vilnius: Liutuviu Kalbos Institutas. 55-87. Peitsara, Kirsti. 1997. “The development of reflexive strategies in English”. Grammaticalization at Work. Eds. Matti Rissanen et al. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 277-319 Reuland, Eric. 1999. “The fine structure of grammar: Anaphoric relations”. Reflexives: Forms and Functions (Typological studies in language, 40) Ed. Zygmunt Frajzyngier. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 1-40. Rissanen, Matti. 1999. “Syntax”. The Cambridge History of the English LanguageVolume 3. Ed. Roger Lass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 187-331
34
Van Gelderen, Elly. 2000. “Bound pronouns and non-local anaphors: The case of Earlier English”. Reflexives Forms and Functions. Eds. Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Tracy S. Curl. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Von Roncador, Manfred. 2006. “Logophoric Pronouns”. ELL2. Ed. Keith Brown. London: Elsevier. 312-315.
35
