New topic -- stative pronouns with reflexives?

"Alfred W. Tüting" ti at fa-kuan.muc.de
Wed Jan 14 14:49:28 UTC 2004


 >This is not typologically all that unusual -- Geraldine Legendre has
argued that the reflexive in French is a de-transitivizing morpheme, not
a direct object (cf. the conjugation with "etre", e.g.)  Cross
linguistically both patterns seem to occur.  Of course, I agree that
it's odd to see fairly closely related languages split on this.<<

It, generally, appears that reflexive is regarded/treated as something
pretty special and different from accusative.
In ME and modern English, an accusative (refl.) no longer exists
(myself, yourself etc.) - cf.
http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:GhB7AxMX94cJ:www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/REFL0.pdf+reflexive+zikh&hl=de&ie=UTF-8

In Yiddish, unlike in German, it's treated pretty special using _zikh_
through all persons, e.g.

I wash myself - Ikh vash zekh (zikh)
You wash yourself - Di (du) vashst zekh
He washes himself - Er vasht zekh
She washes herself - Zi vasht zekh
We wash ourself - Mir vashn zekh
You wash yourselves - Ir vasht zekh
They wash themselves - Zey vashn zekh

(literary forms in brackets)

migluzaza (miglu'z^az^a)
nigluzaza
igluzaza (etc.)

Even in German, I never 'felt' the reflexive pronouns (mich, dich, sich,
uns, euch, sich) to be accusatives (rather than some kind of
intransitive form).

Interestingly, in Slavic and some Romance languages there are reflexive
constructions that have no need of de-transitivizing (hence no such
morphemes functioning that way as pointed to by Legendre!): e.g. in
Rumanian/Spanish "aici se lucreazã/aquí se trabaja" (and many times in
Slavic and Yiddish as well) the morphemes respective go with
/intransitive/ verbs. (Okay, there are also transitives like e.g.
Rumanian _se stie_ [se s^ti'ye] - it is known/one knows - which do not
devaluate this fact stated!)

Also, that's what I found in Dakota: 'Naicijin' [naN-i'ch´i-z^iN] from
_nazin_ (an intransitive verb!). What do you guess is this proper name's
meaning ;) ?

BTW, in http://lakhota.nm.ru/sk2uni.htm#936 the examples for ic'ikte (to
kill oneself) is translated erroneously as *_I ran_ etc.

Alfred



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