Consequences of Reflexivity in Language

Language Sciences, 2000

The reflexive (metalinguistic) properties of language are typically represented as supplemental and inessential. Language, so the story goes, could get along perfectly well without them. The characteristics of language are independent of reflexive discourse — independent of how in metadiscourse we talk about language and its characteristics. This paper challenges this web of received opinion by asking: What might ‘first-order’ language be like if there were no way to talk, write, or sign about it — that is, if there were no ‘second order’ metalinguistic practices? By considering the consequences for writing, translation, pragmatics, semantics, and language acquisition and evolution, the conclusion arrived at is that without ‘second-order’, reflexive properties, ‘first order’ language itself could not exist. Language is essentially reflexive.

Reflexive Language

Human activity is saturated by speech and much of what is distinctive about the human species depends on the use of language. Yet it is not easy to specify exactly what it is about language that is so special. One aspect of language that has drawn extensive attention in this regard is its reflexive capacity: in its full form this property may he unique to human language (Hockett 1963 : 13 ; Lyons 1977 : 5 ; Silverstein 1976 : 16). This reflexive capacity underlies much of the power of language both in everyday life and in scholarly research. A theoretical account of this reflexive capacity will be necessary, therefore, for progress in many of the human disciplines.

Reflexive constructions in the world's languages, ed. by Katarzyna Janic, Nicoletta Puddu, and Martin Haspelmath. Berlin: Language Science Press, 2023

The past four decades have seen a lot of new research on reflexive constructions that goes far beyond the earlier literature, and a variety of technical terms have been used. The divergent frameworks have made some of this literature hard to access. This paper provides a nontechnical overview of the most important kinds of phenomena in the world’s languages and offers a coherent conceptual frame- work and a set of cross-linguistically applicable technical terms, defined also in an appendix. I also explain other widely used terms that do not form part of the present conceptual system (defined in another appendix). The paper begins with a definition of the most basic term (reflexive construction) and then moves to types of reflexivizers (reflexive pronouns and reflexive voice markers), as well as syntac- tic concepts such as ranks and domains. I also briefly discuss obviative anaphoric pronouns and antireflexive marking. Finally, I introduce the distinction between discourse-referential and co-varying coreference. The general philosophy is that we will understand general questions about reflexive constructions (i.e. questions not restricted to the language-particular level) only when we know what is univer- sal and what is historically accidental, so there is also an appendix that lists some possible universals of reflexive constructions.

2000

A truth conditional semantics for inherently/lexically reflexive verbs that distinguishes them from their "derived" reflexive counterparts An account for the way a language's morphology is sensitive to the distinction between the semantics of inherent reflexives vs. "derived" reflexives (Germanic SE-vs. SELF anaphors) [still in progress!]

AILA Review, 2017

Language & Communication, 2023

Everyday metalinguistic ascriptions ("My name is Oliver", "Swahili ng'ombe means cow", "She lied about you") seemingly attribute properties to phenomena of a distinctively linguistic ontology. However, non-representational approaches to cognition, such as ecological psychology, cannot accommodate this linguistic ontology without contravening their nonrepresentational principles. An alternative might be to construe metalinguistic ascriptions as 'folk' fictions which are, strictly speaking, false. Yet this would render unintelligible the practical role that metalinguistic ascription occupies in everyday discourse. We suggest another alternative. By analogy to mindshaping approaches in folk-psychological debates, we propose a nonrepresentational account of metalinguistic ascription as a form of language-shaping. Metalinguistic ascriptions shape language behavior over temporal and social scales by prospectively shaping discursive niches.

1989

Lingvisticae Investigationes, 1986

In many languages of the world reflexive markers have passive meaning in addition to their basic reflexive meaning. This is a puzzling cross-linguistic phenemenon because it occurs not only in genetically related languages, such as German and French, but also in genetically unrelated and structurally sharply distinct languages, such as Uto-Aztecan family of American Indian languages and Slavic languages. Obviously, this cannot be considered an acci dent, but rather is rooted in some fundamental universal property of human languages. In order to explain the cross-linguistic passive use of reflexive markers, we have to search for an invariant of their various uses in languages of the world. The goal of the present paper is to discover this invariant and its functional and formal connections with various uses of reflexive markers. To achieve our goal, we use the conceptual and formal apparatus of Applicative Grammar.