1
Reflexivity and Intensification in Middle English Claudia Lange SEM III, 9.3.01
Reflexivity and Intensification in Middle English[1]
Claudia Lange, TU Dresden
0. Introduction
One of the many remarkable changes the syntactic structure of English underwent during its history concerns the way reflexivity is expressed, as the following examples indicate[2]:
(1) He cwæδ: δine stemne ic gehire, leof, on neorxnawange, & ic ondræde me for δam δe ic eom nacod, & ic behyde me ‘And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself’ (ÆGen, quoted after Keenan 1996:6)
(2) Christus se dedit pro nobis Crist sealde hyne sylfne for us (ÆGramm (96.5))
(3) Hie gewendon heom to ðam cynge (‘They turned them(selves) to that king’) (Chron an. 1046)
(4) On cros godd boght ur saul liues, þar-on he gaf him-seluen ranscun ‚on the cross God bought life for our souls, thereon he gave himself as remission‘ (Cursor Mundi 1244, quoted after Peitsara 1997:299)
(5) Halde þe wel payed ‚hold yourself well paid‘ (Gawain 2341, quoted after van Gelderen 1999:205)
(6) He shall repente hym (Paston Letters, 143 (1452), quoted after van Gelderen 1999:209)
In Old and Middle English, the simple personal pronoun was normally used to express the reflexive relation, as in (1) and (5). Only ocasionally and in specific contexts, as I will show below, was the intensifier self, a free form, added as in (2). This pattern continued to be used throughout the Middle English and into the Early Modern English period before it gave way to the form of reflexive marking with pronoun+self. Further, constructions such as (3) and (6) with a non-argument or pleonastic reflexive pronoun died out, (6) representing a set expression with a French loan when the pattern was already quite rare at that stage.
Reflexivity in the most general sense can be understood as the marking of coreference of subject and object; reflexive pronouns[3] occur syntactically as objects of verbs indicating coreference with the subject NP (a nominal antecedent in the same clause) or as complements of prepositional phrases; they are arguments of the verb. For OE and ME, the definition of reflexivity needs to be extended to cover what has been called ‘pleonastic reflexive dative’ (Mitchell 1985:113), ‘non-argument’ or ‘non-theta’ reflexive (Keenan 1996) as in (3) above.
In Modern English, the expression corresponding to German selbst is identical in form with the reflexive pronoun, though not in distribution. The meaning of x-self in an example like The queen herself declared the bazaar open is clearly not reflexive and, for lack of a better term, was commonly characterised as „emphatic“; a term which is, as has repeatedly been pointed out, not only vague but misleading: „it is necessary to distinguish the kind of emphasis signalled by -self from other types of emphasis (signalled by, for example, repetition, or constructions like topicalisation or clefting)“ (Kemmer 1995:57); a better term is ‘intensifier’.
Today, English is unique among the Germanic languages in employing a complex expression, made up of personal pronoun+self, as reflexive marker also serving as intensifier. Not having a reflexive marker is a situation not uncommon within the language family, also found, for example, in Frisian, Old Dutch, and Afrikaans (König & van der Auwera 1994:XI). In what follows, I will try to trace some aspects of that development that set English apart from other Germanic languages; I will also consider whether that change was linked to the major structural changes that took place in the period under discussion.
The organisation of this paper is as follows. In the first section, I will present the analysis of intensifying x-self in Modern English that forms the basis for the following foray into Middle English. The second section is devoted to sketching the development of the complex reflexive and intensifier in Middle English, while section three summarizes my main points and reviews further interesting questions I have not touched upon (yet).
1. X-self: a synchronic analysis[4]
The fact that Modern English does not formally distinguish intensifier and reflexive, whereas Old English does, is clearly in need of explanation. self underwent a gradual process of losing its independence as a lexical item and becoming fused to the oblique personal pronoun, giving rise to the polysemy of reflexive marker and intensifier noted above:
Old English / Modern Englishself, sylf, seolf / x-self
free form (adjective) / bound morpheme
intensifier (postnominal) / element of intensifier
identifier/marker of reference (attributive) / element of reflexive pronoun
noun[5]
According to König (1991), intensifiers in general can be analysed as a special case of scalar additive particles. Siemund (1997:11ff) argues for subsuming intensifiers under focus particles despite the obvious incongruities between the two word classes, mainly because of their parallel function: both interact with the focus structure of a sentence:
„All sentences containing intensifiers divide into a focused or highlighted part and a background part, i.e. intensifiers structure propositions. Moreover, intensifiers always evoke alternatives to the focused constituent“ (Siemund 1997).
Further, both focus particles and self have positional variability in common, and both can occur more than once in a sentence. Unlike invariant, unstressed focus particles, however, x-self displays agreement with its focus and carries stress. x-self is also restricted to nominal foci, while particles may occur with a large variety of word classes. Finally. x-self generally occurs in a position behind its focus, particles appear before their focus.
focus agreement
(pro-) nominal intensifier
constituent
ModE distinguishes three separate uses of pronoun+self, apart from its use as reflexive anaphor indicating co-reference in a local domain, being referentially dependent on some preceding N. They all behave like adjuncts, either to some NP if adnominal or to the VP if adverbal.
Siemund assigns all three uses of intensifiers to a common denominator, namely „the ability to structure sets into a central element on the one hand and peripheral elements on the other.“
In the taxonomy to follow, the first term refers to syntactic, the second to semantic properties of pronoun+self in this particular usage.
1.1. Adnominal, centralising self
(7) The minister HIMSELF will receive us
Adnominal HIMSELF follows its focus and bears stress. There are hardly any syntactic or semantic restrictions on the focus. The NP to which x-self is right-adjacent may be subject, object, or complement of a preposition. It may be a proper noun, a common noun or a pronoun, with restrictions applying to pronominal head NPs, as the discussion will show.
The contribution adnominal HIMSELF makes to the meaning of a sentence is to mark the focus as central in relation to possible alternatives: the Minister HIMSELF -rather than some lesser beings around him- will receive us. The focus accompanied by pronoun+self forms the centre among similar entities that are assigned to the periphery. Negation does not affect this meaning of self.
This meaning of x-self is likely to form the historically prior as well as the core meaning of the focus particle x-self. At least x-self in adverbial-inclusive use is closely connected with the adnominal use: I'm a bit short MYSELF = I MYSELF am a bit short, TOO.
More precisely, the meaning of adnominal x-self can be stated as follows (Siemund 1997:192):
Adnominal intensifiers structure a set into a central element X and peripheral elements Y.
a. X has a higher position than Y in a hierarchy
b. X is more significant than Y in a specific situation
c. Y is defined in terms of X
d. X is the centre of perspective (logophoricity).
The relation between the central element X and the peripheral elements Y may take the form of one of the four specific relations listed above, as illustrated by the following examples[6]:
a. The Pope himself does not know what to do.
b. Most of the passengers suffered light injuries. The driver himself was killed.
c. Adam’s wife was picking apples, Adam himself was peeling them.
d. He was not particularly tall, a little taller than Jemima herself perhaps. (A. Fraser, A Splash of Red)
Following Baker (1995:80ff.), Siemund differentiates situational and organisational centres as possible foci of adnominal self[7]. Organisational centres are centres in their own right and not in need of further justification, they occupy their position due to extralinguistic factors and independent of the current context of discourse. Situational centres, on the other hand, receive their prominent role within and from a specific context and constellation.
Adnominal self places hardly any selectional restrictions on its focus; the NP it intensifies may denote human or non-human referents.
1.2. Adverbal self
Like adnominal intensifiers, adverbal x-self in both its inclusive and exclusive use is always in association with an NP, though not a member of it. Adverbal x-self never occurs adjacent to the NP with which it shows agreement and is best analysed as belonging to the VP, or more precisely, as a VP-adjunct or an endocentric expansion of the VP. It mainly occurs in typical adverb positions, e.g. sentence-final and between auxiliary and main verb. Siemund demonstrates, however, that they do hardly behave like other adverbs, and suggests the term ‘focusing adverb’ as the least unfitting label because of their association with an NP, their carrying stress and their semantic property of evoking alternatives (78).
1.2.1. Adverbal, inclusive self
(8) Could you lend me ten pounds? - I'm sorry, but I am a bit short MYSELF.
The utterance containing the intensifier could be paraphrased with additive focus particles as I am a bit short, too or I am also a bit short. With this utterance, the speaker is in fact including herself among the set of contextually given possible alternatives to her own person, therefore the label ‘inclusive’ to specify the semantics of this particular use of self.
The focus of adverbal x-self has to be the subject denoting a human referent; in terms of thematic roles, the focus is an EXPERIENCER. x-self appears as part of the VP rather than the NP headed by the focus.
Again x-self places special emphasis on its focus, but only within a narrowly defined context: x-self assigns prominence to the focus compared with the periphery which is given by the immediate context.
1.2.2. Adverbal, exclusive self
(9) The girls painted the flat themselves (=on their own, without help)
In this case, the focus has to be an animate, agent subject, but not necessarily human. The action denoted by the VP must be capable of being carried out by other agents as well, otherwise an exclusive interpretation of the focus particle is blocked: In the phrase Paul is snoring himself the action of snoring cannot be assigned alternatively to somebody else; therefore the focus particle bears the inclusive meaning (Paul also snores).
The analysis above, then, leaves us with the following picture of the meanings of self[8]:
x-self
reflexive pronoun intensifier
adnominal, centralising adverbal, inclusive adverbal, exclusive
The questions now are which of these meanings were already present in the older stages of the language, why the original monomorphemic intensifier disappeared and why the complex reflexive marker consisting of pronoun+self became obligatory.
In the next section, I will show that in Middle English, the semantics of intensifying self still determines its use when it occurs adjacent to a reflexive pronoun; the compound reflexive becomes obligatory only later. The rise of the new form is linked to another process, namely the realignment of the middle domain: the reflexive constructions with a pleonastic pronoun, which can be interpreted as a kind of middle, die out, so that the only option to express reflexivity is marking with pronoun+self.
3. Middle English
Most studies concerned with Middle English mention the transitional quality of the language of that period, the profusion of forms and possibilities available which make a tight analysis difficult, and I will make no exception, but will then proceed to my topic and rely on Fischer (1992:208), who states that
“the major syntactical changes in the Middle English period do not find their origin in dialectal variants, but are a result of the morphological developments discussed above. These are common to all Middle English dialects. It is true that individual dialects may have undergone these changes at different times, but the ultimate results do not essentially differ."
Before I look into the development in ME, I will sketch how reflexives and intensifiers were distributed in OE, for two reasons: the processes that I am looking at originate in late Old English and range over the entire Middle English period. Secondly, tracing the source meaning of an item undergoing grammaticalization is important for establishing in how far the original semantic substance determined its later distribution once it is no longer an independent lexical item.
3.1. self in Old English
As already noted, OE used the simple personal pronoun to express both conjoint and disjoint reference; a sentence like Judasi hinei,j aheng is therefore ambiguous between two interpretations: Judas might have hanged himself or somebody else[9].
Mitchell (1985: 187ff.) classifies OE self as ‘pronoun/adjective’ and further categorizes it as an ‘indefinite’ belonging to the subgroup of ‘words marking identity and the contrary’ together with quantifiers like eall ‘all’, ilca ‘the same’ etc. self may precede or follow its head N just as other adjectives (though preposing was more common for adjectives) do, and it follows the usual rules of adjectival inflection, alternating between weak (indefinite) when the NP is introduced by a definite article or demonstrative and strong (definite) if not. Unlike adjectives, self cannot be compared, and it „can be used both dependently and independently“ (103), that is either with a noun or instead of a noun; self alone in nominative case occurs when a pronoun subject is left unexpressed in paratactic sentence structures.