Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Detail #294: An Unusual Way of Marking Reflexives

A thing that could be somewhat interesting would be to form reflexive objects by using a preposition and a pronoun. In the example sentences, I'll use eg as that preposition:
I washed eg me
I washed myself
However, this could also provide a way of doing reflexive possession:
he sold eg car
he sold his (own) car

he sold his car
he sold another third person's car
This would qualify as a preposition on syntactical grounds - whatever syntactical differences you find in the language between objects and prepositional phrases, you'd need to have this line up with the prepositional phrases: this might include omitting object marking on the verb, not permitting certain transformations, requiring the noun to be in some specific case.

We could also restrict this from combining with other prepositions, thus making 'by him', 'from him', etc not distinguish reflexive and other third person.

If the language permits reflexives in subject position (which some languages do in positions such as 'he1 doesn't know that he1's won the lottery', this could be made interesting by requiring a verb voice that lacks syntactical subject altogether, and for which the 'eg [Noun]' phrase is the demoted subject.




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