Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

1998

Thesis Director

Rosemary A. Buck

Abstract

This thesis explores syntactic and semantic properties of intensive reflexives (IRs) in English. The study is based on examples selected from the following on-line databases: Wilson Humanities Abstracts and The New York Times Book Review Digest Abstracts. The analysis also incorporates examples cited from linguistic articles on the subject of RRs and IRs.

As opposed to regular reflexives (RRs), IRs have not been given sufficient consideration in linguistic accounts. As a point of departure, the author utilizes Quirk's and Greenbaum's descriptive framework to examine the evidence from the database. Since RRs are discussed more extensively than IRs in this framework, RRs are studied first, and are regarded as circumscribing standards for the subsequent investigation of IRs. The descriptive analysis of IRs and RRs shows that IRs, in addition to having the same morphological forms as RRs, display other affinities with RRs. First, both RRs and IRs exhibit a marked preference for subject antecedents positioned in the same clause as themselves. Second, RRs and IRs accept NP antecedents from non-subject positions. Third, NP antecedents do not have to be located in the same clause as IRs and RRs but can be implied from a neighboring main clause.

Subsequently, the author undertakes to look closely into the syntactic distribution of IRs and RRs. It is demonstrated that while IRs take optional syntactic positions (i.e., they appear in apposition with the NPs they intensify, come after an auxiliary/modal verb, or at the end of a clause), RRs fill obligatory syntactic slots (i.e., those associated with a direct and indirect object, object of a preposition, and a subject complement).

On the assumption that reflexivity is tied to syntactic obligatoriness and intensivity to syntactic optionality, RRs and IRs may be described in terms of the features (reflexive) and (intensive). As a result, RRs and IRs are assigned the following set of features, respectively: RRs (maximally reflexive, minimally intensive); IRs {maximally intensive, minimally reflexive). Further, an attempt is made at defining the features (max intensive) and (max reflexive) "built into" IRs and RRs, respectively. Unlike the feature (maximally reflexive), the "activation" of the feature (maximally intensive) depends on the following contextual factors: contrastive or emphatic context and discourse-prominent NP antecedent. By contrast, the feature (maximally reflexive) conveys interaction with one's self (i.e., an agent performs some action on himself or herself), which does not hold of the feature (maximally intensive).

Finally, the author explores another context-related connection between IRs and their NP antecedents. Twofold assumptions are made. First, for NPs to be intensified by IRs, they should be referential and/or identifiable in addition to being discourse-prominent. Second, the link between the referential status of intensified NPs and the presence of IRs is likely to be affected by the syntactic positioning of IRs. In the process of examining Lyons's notion of reference (singular/general and definite/indefinite) against examples from the database, the author discovers that the assumptions posed at the beginning of the analysis appear to be correct. On the one hand, there is a link between the referentiality of intensified NPs and IRs, and, on the other hand, the link in question seems to be relevant only to adjacent (i.e., appositional) IRs. This leads to the conclusion that IRs do not form a uniform grammatical category.

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