reflexives as subjects

[Edith A Moravcsik]

As Wolfgang Schulze's interesting discussion of East Causasian suggests,
any language which has emphatic reflexives and which is also pro-drop will
allow for sentences where the subject is just the emphatic reflexives,
with the subject pronoun itself absent.

However, as I remember, the original query pertained to anaphoric,
rather than emphatic, reflexives in subject position; i.e., cases where
the same person is referred to as both subject and object (or oblique) in
a sentence and, of the two mentions, it is the subject that takes on a
reflexive form (i.e. _Himself hurt him._, to mean 'He hurt himself.')

Edith Moravcsik


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                         Edith A. Moravcsik
                         Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics
                         University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
                         Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413
                         USA

                         E-mail: edith at uwm.edu
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