Questions tagged [reflexive]
The reflexive tag has no usage guidance.
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Possessive reflexive pronouns (himself's, herself's, myself's, etc.)
"He looked out the window and saw his car."
Does "his" mean the same person initially called "he", or someone else? In English, it could be either one.
If the English ...
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Pronouns referring to parts of the same sentence other than the subject
Many European languages have specific pronouns for the case that the subject and an object are identical, e. g.
Reflexive
Non-reflexive
Engl.
"Peter sees himself (in the mirror)"
"...
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Reflexive Pronouns and Relative Clauses
At least in my dialect of English, sentences like the following are perfectly grammatical:
The picture of himselfi that Tomi most liked is on the table.
How does one account for the binding here? If ...
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What is the semantic term for the things that the single arguments of reflexive and reciprocal verbs stand for?
In my native English, the first argument in "Mary feeds her pigs" stands for an agent, and the second stands for a patient.
But what about the arguments in reflexive and reciprocal clauses in single-...
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a question about reflexives and nonreflexives
Why "the house(i) had a fence around itself(i)" is ungrammatical but "Susan(i) wrapped the blanket around herself(i)" is grammatical?
user27687
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Is "imperatives have invisible subjects" a universal?
In English, it's widely held that imperative verbs have "invisible" subjects, on the syntactic level. For example, we see look at yourself in the mirror, rather than *look at you in the mirror, which ...
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The Grelling-Nelson Paradox
The following excerpt is from Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.
Divide the adjectives in English into two categories: those which are self-descriptive, such as "...
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How does McWhorter explain Pronominal Reflexive Verbs by distinguishing 'remembering something' vs. 'remembering is something that happens to you'?
McWhorter, J. PhD Linguistics (Stanford). Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (2009).
How can [1.] and [2.] (coloured in grey beneath) be distinguished? Doesn't 1 entail 2? How can "the remembering is [...
user5306
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Romance-like pronominal verbs elsewhere
Romance languages are known to have lots of so-called pronominal verbs, which are always conjugated with a reflexive pronoun even though the action is not actually reflexive: for example, Spanish irse,...
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Causatives and Reflexives
Causatives have been analysed as a single clause with a split-VP.
If the binding of reflexives is only possible intra-clausally, why is there this contrast ingrammaticality?
[Mary]i let [John]j kill ...
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Does any other language have as many reflexive pronouns as English?
1st person: myself, ourselves
2nd person: yourself yourselves
3rd person: himself, herself, itself, themselves, oneself
In Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and German there is only one reflexive ...
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Is there any good, theory-neutral definition of long-distance reflexives in the literature?
Long distance reflexives/anaphora/binding are much discussed in the literature, particularly among generativists, but while there seems to be rough agreement on what constitutes a long-distance ...
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