This is a companion post to Detail #422: Variations on Reflexives. Detail #422 mostly elaborated on the syntax of reflexive reference. This post will elaborate on ways of encoding reflexiveness.
This was inspired by this quote in a paper I recently read:
"There are three types of reflexives in the world’s languages (Lichtenberk, 1994, p. 3504):
- nominal (nouns or pronouns),
-
verbal (the reflexive marker is a part of the verb morphology),
-
possessive (e.g. the possessive adjectives)."
This naturally made me wonder if we can imagine some additional ways. Naturally, a few ideas emerged.
1. Adverbial reflexive markers
Adverbs like 'back', 'in return', 'alone', etc.
2. Adpositional reflexive markers
One could imagine some types of adposition to be more strongly associated with reflexivity, but maybe have a lower semantic granularity than other prepositions in the language. Consider, e.g. a situation where 'on him' develops to be reflexive but 'at him' to be non-reflexive.
3. Auxiliaries
One could easily imagine verbs like 'get' developing into more of a reflexive meaning than a passive meaning. I.e. 'get fucked' could just as well develop to mean 'fuck yourself'.
4. Omission / Default reflexivity
To some extent, this is sort of something already; 'wash' in some languages defaults to a reflexive meaning. However, ... this is of course only reflexive in the sense of 'reflexive in some target language'. However, if you were to ask 'who are you washing' in those languages, an explicit reflexive would probably be given.
5. That weird Finnish thing
A related thing is the Finnish reflexive -nsa/-an possessive suffix, which is reflexive when no genitive pronoun precedes it, but just a regular third person possessive when the noun is preceded by a genitive.
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