reflexives in subject position

[John Myhill]

Regarding the ostensible reflexives in subject position: Are the people
who have suggested them (in e.g. Georgian, Nepali) sure that these aren't
logophoric/long-range 'reflexives'? In Japanese, 'jibun', the ostensible
'reflexive', can freely be used in subject position, but this is because
it isn't really a reflexive, in the sense that it doesn't require (and
doesn't normally have) an antecedent in the same clause. It gets used in
3rd person narratives when the writer wants to clearly take the viewpoint
of a certain character, e.g. In a 3rd person narrative section if you say
'jibun was tired' it's sort of like throwing in a quote 'I'm tired', without
quotations marks, you're reporting it 'from the inside' so to speak. In
traditional generative studies of Japanese 'jibun' is called a `reflexive',
but this is because theories based on languages like English need something
called a reflexive they can use for their syntactic tests, and 'jibun' is the
closest they can come in Japanese, because it IS used in cases translating
as reflexives. But I had a student once who did a study on how 'jibun' is
used in Japanese texts, gathered about 50 examples of long-range viewpoint
usages of various types and analyzed them nicely, and after she had given
her presentation I asked her 'what about reflexive usages, where the antecedent
is in the same clause?' She had forgotten about them completely, and when
she went back to check her database, there wasn't a single one. So you could
say that Japanese allows 'reflexive subjects', but it's kind of silly.

Is this what's going on in Georgian and Nepali?

John