Reflections on Reflexives in Modern English
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Günter Rohdenburg
Abstract
On the basis of large-scale corpus analyses, this paper deals with three historical developments involving reflexive structures: (a) the withdrawal of the compound reflexive pronoun (e.g. yourself) from the position after the sequence verb + particle (as in spruce up yourself) in favour of the position between the verb and the particle (as in spruce yourself up), (b) the general replacement of the compound reflexive by zero (henceforth: the zero variant) and two minor rivalling constructions, with American English being typically further advanced than British English, and (c) the increasing use of reflexive structures and other low transitivity features in the sense of Hopper and Thompson (1980) with certain recessive combinations of verb + object NP + that-clause complement (as in She congratulated herself that things had turned out well). Focusing on the rivalry between the compound reflexive and the zero variant, the paper explores four major factors constraining the distribution of the two competing alternatives. These include the frequency of occurrence of the relevant verb, the degree of transitivity of the overall clause, horror aequi, and various manifestations of (morpho-)syntactic complexity.
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- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- The Treatise on the Sacrament in Cambridge, St John’s College G.25: An Edition
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- Tracing the Loss of Boundedness in the History of English: The Anaphoric Status of Initial Prepositional Phrases in Old English and Late Middle English
- Reflections on Reflexives in Modern English
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- Sara M. Pons-Sanz.The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English. Studies in the Early Middle Ages 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013, xv + 589 pp., € 125.00.
- T. L. Burton (ed.).The Sound of William Barnes’s Dialect Poems: 1. Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, first collection (1844). Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2013, xix + 593 pp., $ 66.00.
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- Books Received
