A History of English Reflexive Pronouns: Person, Self, and Interpretability (Linguistik Aktuell / Linguistics Today)

This title brings together a number of distinct phenomena in the history of English: the introduciton of special reflexive pronouns (for example, myself), the loss of verbal agreement and pro-drop and the disappearance of morphological case. It provides examples from Old and Middle English texts showing a person split between first, second and third person pronouns. Extending an analysis by Reinhart and Reuland, the author argues that the strength of certain pronominal features (such as case, person, and number) differs cross-linguistically and that parametric variation accounts for the changes in English.