Reflexive Pronouns: A Theoretical and Experimental Synthesis

Reflexive Pronouns: A Theoretical and Experimental Synthesis

Author: Darcy Sperlich

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-01-04

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 3030638758

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This book presents a comprehensive picture of reflexive pronouns from both a theoretical and experimental perspective, using the well-researched languages of English, German, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In order to understand the data from varying theoretical perspectives, the book considers selected syntactic and pragmatic analyses based on their current importance in the field. The volume consequently introduces the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach, which is a novel theoretical synthesis incorporating a sentence and pragmatic processor that accounts for reflexive pronoun behaviour in these six languages. Moreover, in support of this model a vast array of experimental literature is considered, including first and second language acquisition, bilingual, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and clinical studies. It is through both the intuitive and experimental data linguistic theorizing relies upon that brings out the strengths of the modelling adopted here, paving new avenues for future research. In sum, this volume unites a diverse array of the literature that currently sits largely divorced between the theoretical and experimental realms, and when put together a better understanding of reflexive pronouns under the auspices of the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach is forged.


A History of English Reflexive Pronouns

A History of English Reflexive Pronouns

Author: Elly van Gelderen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2000-10-20

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 902729917X

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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.


On Interpreting Morphological Change

On Interpreting Morphological Change

Author: Roger D. Woodard

Publisher: Brill

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13:

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In classical Attic Greek of the fifth century B.C., there are found six distinct forms of the reflexive pronoun: one form for each of the three persons of the singular and of the plural. This morphologically elaborate system is eventually replaced, however, by one in which there is only a single reflexive pronominal stem (*auto- or its variant èuto-). In On Interpreting Morphological Change, Woodard traces the course of this linguistic development through a period of approxi-mately six cen-turies. An analysis of this pr-cess of morpho-logical replacement reveals that the change is motivated by morphological redundancy and is sensitive to a hierarchy of grammatical relations.


Reflexive Pronouns in Schoolbooks

Reflexive Pronouns in Schoolbooks

Author: Sarah McCarty

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2010-12-08

Total Pages: 20

ISBN-13: 3640772601

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Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,0, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut für England- und Amerikastudien), course: Theory of Anaphora in Context , language: English, abstract: In this term paper I will investigate whether the implementation of reflexive pronouns through seventh grade English-schoolbooks is sufficient to let students understand and eventually use this phenomenon correctly. In the first part of this paper, I will begin with introducing the phenomenon. Here, I will give a short overview of how reflexive pronouns developed. Furthermore, I will present two different acknowledged theories (Chomsky and Reinhart & Reuland) and their conditions on reflexive pronouns. I will then show the two different usages of this phenomenon and will give examples of cases which are somewhat different from the common way of using it. In the second part, I will present the explanations and rules as they are given in the three most commonly used schoolbooks here in Hesse to show how reflexive pronouns are implemented. In part three, I will investigate in how far these rules are sufficient to explain the examples given in those schoolbooks respectively. I will furthermore analyze examples given in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost”, which are suggested for the use in seventh grade. Here, I will rather put my focus on somewhat more complex examples in order to find out whether those short rules apply for them as well. I will then conclude, whether my assumption that the explanations in these schoolbooks are not sufficient can be verified.


The Grammar of English Reflexives

The Grammar of English Reflexives

Author: Michael Helke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-07-03

Total Pages: 117

ISBN-13: 1317420349

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This work, first published in 1979, was a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. The first chapter of this thesis concerns the supposed complementarity of reflexives and ordinary anaphoric pronouns. In the second chapter a theory of reflexivisation is characterised which encompasses several other theories. The third chapter considers apparent counter-examples to the generalizations regarding reflexives that were established in Chapter Two. The fourth chapter concerns the meaning of reflexives. This book will be of interest of students of language and linguistics.