A History of English Re exives: from Old English into Early Modern English

This thesis examines the variation and change in re exive pronouns from Old English into Early Modern English covering the period circa 800 to 1639. In Old English the locally bound re exive form was identical to the ordinary personal pronoun e.g. him, but at the start of the Middle English Period a new morphologically complex form emerged e.g. himself. Using data drawn from syntactically annotated corpora of Old English, Middle English and Early Modern English, the distribution of the two re exive forms is quantitatively compared in order to detail the variation between the two forms and the nature of the change from the old form to the new. Examination of re exives in Old English suggests that the origin of the new re exive is the old re exive plus the intensi er. By comparing the rates of such constructions in Old English, with the rates of the new re exive in Middle English, I demonstrate that the frequencies remain broadly stable, suggesting that there is not a signi cant change between the two periods. Similarly I provide evidence via multivariate analysis that the same factors determine the distribution of re exive versus re exive plus intensi er in Old English as determine the old re exive versus the new re exive in Middle English. I therefore advance the theory that the new re exive in Middle English remains semantically decomposable into re exive and intensi er. Therefore in Old and Middle English there is really only one re exive pronoun (him) which may or may not co-occur with the intensi er. The frequency of the `new re exive' forms increases in Early Modern English, until by the middle of this period they account for nearly all cases of local binding. This change is explained via two processes; rstly an alteration in the feature speci cation of pronominals which means that they can no longer function re exively and secondly the loss of the meaning of the intensi er which is subsequently reanalysed as a morphological element signalling coreference.