A History of English Reflexive Pronouns

This book brings together a number of seemingly distinct phenomena in the history of English: the introduction of special reflexive pronouns (e.g. myself), the loss of verbal agreement and pro-drop, and the disappearance of morphological Case. It provides vast numbers of examples from Old and Middle English texts showing a person split between first, second, and third person pronouns. Extending an analysis by Reinhart & Reuland, the author argues that the ‘strength’ of certain pronominal features (Case, person, number) differs cross-linguistically and that parametric variation accounts for the changes in English. The framework used is Minimalist, and Interpretable and Uninterpretable features are seen as the key to explaining the change from a synthetic to an analytic language.

Volker Gast, Free University Berlin in Language 78(3), 2002:
A History of English Reflexive Pronouns is an interesting and substantial contribution to the history of reflexivity in English that combines accurate philological research with contemporary theoretical syntax in a very original way. I recommend the book to everybody interested in the history of English reflexives as well as to those engaged in recent syntactic theorizing in the domain of reflexivity.