What are you looking for, ?
- ISBN: 9789027227607
- Category: Linguistics
- Learning Level:
- Status: Temporarily out of stock. Despatched within 12 working days.
£92.00
A History of English Reflexive Pronouns
by Gelderen, Elly Van Published by John BenjaminsPublished 2000.
This book brings together several seemingly distinct phenomena in the history of English: the introduction of special reflexive pronouns (e.g. me), the loss of verbal agreement and pro-drop, and the disappearance of morphological Case. It provides vast numbers of examples from Old and Middle English texts showing a person split between first, second, and third person pronouns. Extending an analysis by Reinhart & Reuland, the author argues that the 'strength' of certain pronominal features (Case, person, number) differs cross-linguistically and that parametric variation accounts for the changes in English. The framework used is Minimalist, and Interpretable and Uninterpretable features are the key to explaining the change from a synthetic to an analytic language.
