A History of English Reflexive Pronouns

Download or read book A History of English Reflexive Pronouns written by Elly van Gelderen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-10-20 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.