Reflexives continued + Position of possessive pronouns

[Grsartor at AOL.COM]

Hailai allai, especially Llama_nom for his consideration of the questions I 
raised last year about reflexive pronouns, but gave up on. I decided the 
solution was beyond me, and left its discovery to others. However there is one thing 
I should like to say. It concerns the "missing" nominative form *seins. 
Surely the reason for its non-existence is that normally there would be no reason 
for it to be used. For example, in a statement like "his son is sick" you would 
presumably have

        sunus is ist siuks,

because the son is the subject of the sentence and the his-word ("is") refers 
to someone else (the father). Even if the father is explicitly brought into 
the sentence, as in "the father says that his son is sick", the son remains the 
subject in its own clause:

        sa atta qiþiþ þatei sunus is ist siuks   (I think)

If instead an accusative and infinitive construction is used, ("the father 
declares his son to be sick") I believe this would be regarded by grammarians as 
only one clause, and the reflexive pronoun would presumably be expected in 
Gothic. But as it would be in the accusative case, it would still not be *seins:

        sa atta qiþiþ sunu seinana siukana wisan (I suppose)

(I can think of one kind of sentence that might call for *seins. It is 
exemplified by "he is his own boss". Possibly Gothic would have used a more emphatic 
word than *seins here, just as English would have "his own" rather than 
simply "his". But at least *seins looks as if it would be grammatically 
justifiable.)

Gerry T.


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