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I read on Wals (and I think other places) that reflexive pronouns can have a number of origins, such as body parts (body, head, bone, heart, skin), precise values (very, exact), or "alone". However, I haven't found anything for languages where the verb receives reflexive marking, as in Spanish -se and Russina -sja. What are some lexical or morphosyntactic sources for reflexive verb inflections?

IIRC, the reflexive ending for verbs in Russian derives from a reflexive pronoun (in the accusative I think) but I'm not sure where that came from.

sangi39 wrote:IIRC, the reflexive ending for verbs in Russian derives from a reflexive pronoun (in the accusative I think) but I'm not sure where that came from.

It comes from PIE reflexive *se.

Pole, the wrote:

sangi39 wrote:IIRC, the reflexive ending for verbs in Russian derives from a reflexive pronoun (in the accusative I think) but I'm not sure where that came from.

It comes from PIE reflexive *se.

Well now that makes sense

At this point, I'm assuming that many, if not all, reflexive markers on verbs arise from reflexive pronouns becoming attached to the verb. At least, it looks that way for I.E. languages.

For the Semitic languages I've seen, reflexive forms are apparently more of a derivation than inflection. I've seen that T- and N- prefix forms are common, but I haven't found where those come from, and I doubt that I will.

I haven't found non-I.E. or non-Semitic languages yet that mark the verb for reflexivity, so if anyone knows of some I'd like to take a look at them.

Bantu languages have a reflexive object marker (-zi- in Zulu). It is in the same position as other object markers and there is some additional evidence for it being an object marker synchronically. For instance, the presence of an object marker has influence over the form of the imperative, if there is no object marker the form of the imperative (for most verbs) is STEM-a, but if there is an object marker it is OM-STEM-e. Thus if you say "hit a man" you say shay-a indoda, but if you say "hit him"(with the 3rd person noun class one object marker m-) it is m-shay-e. If you say "hit yourself" you say zi-shay-e. I don't think anybody has any idea what the source of the reflexive is, but object markers in general are thought to derive from pronouns. Interestingly, the reciprocal marker behaves in many ways like a derivational morpheme, and not like an object marker at all.


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Isn't my/you/his/her ass a new reflexive pronoun in the making?

In Quechua the reflexive is a suffix -ku, one of a largish set of verbal suffixes, quite distinct from the personal endings (which include the subject-object markers).

But what is the origin of the -ku suffix?

A friend of mine has a theory that I am inclined to accept that the Nahuatl reflexive prefix mo- is derived from a PUA root *mo'o meaning "head", and originated as an incorporated noun. The same apparently happened in Basque.

Radagast revived wrote:But what is the origin of the -ku suffix?

Haven't the slightest idea. Our time depth with Quechua is very short, so we usually don't have information on where the particles came from. For what it's worth, -ku varies in meaning across dialects, sometimes being used as a mediopassive, and in Ecuador as a durative.

how do the Quechua dialects where -ku isn't a reflexive do reflexives?

By using other suffixes. Ancash, for instance, uses -kaa, which Gary Parker identifies with the root ka- 'be'.

(As a disclaimer, though, I haven't closely studied the morphology of the dialects. I looked it up in the Ancash grammar because Ancash is the most different from Cuzqueño, and in Cerrón-Palomino's overview, Lingüística Quechua.)

Reflexives are a kind of intranstive verb. Japanese has many fossilized patterns for making transitive and intransitive pairs. There's 2 main kinds: vowel change and adding -su.

Examples:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Japanese/G ... ansitivity
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/ti_list.html

Maybe the vowel change comes from some kind of suffix that umlauted the preceding vowel, and maybe the -su comes from 'suru' ('do'). I'm not sure about either of these though.

Pole, the wrote:

sangi39 wrote:IIRC, the reflexive ending for verbs in Russian derives from a reflexive pronoun (in the accusative I think) but I'm not sure where that came from.

It comes from PIE reflexive *se.

I'm more familiar with the reconstruction being *swe.

sangi39 wrote:Well now that makes sense

If you want some more speculation, some IEanists assume that *swe goes back to a word meaning "family, clan", and that the development went from "(own) clan" > "own" and "self".

Siouan has the verbal prefix *-ixki- which doesn't bear any resemblance to any pronouns (or anything else that I can think of except the dative infix *-ki- and suus *-kik-).

Thanks for the info so far. Seems like there's a lot of reflexive markers where the origin is murky at best.

The most interesting article I've read so far is Reflexives and Middle in some Polynesian and New Caledonian Languages. It details how those languages have no specifically reflexive pronouns per se or reflexive verbal inflections. A bunch of different strategies are used to indicate reflexivity. This is good to know since I was looking at not using reflexive pronouns for my conlang.

merijn wrote:Isn't my/you/his/her ass a new reflexive pronoun in the making?

This made me laugh out loud at work. Got a few raised eyebrows.

Vardelm wrote:

merijn wrote:Isn't my/you/his/her ass a new reflexive pronoun in the making?

This made me laugh out loud at work. Got a few raised eyebrows.

Objective pronoun, at any rate. I've heard some non-reflexive uses, e.g. "That'll kill your ass."

Also an intensifier:
These are some tasty-ass burgers

Obligatory relevant Xkcd

Are there any languages that use a genitive case on pronouns to indicate reflexivity, rather than having a separate set of reflexive pronouns? So, you would have something like this:

he.NOM hit.PERF he.ACC = "He hit him (someone else)."

he.NOM hit.PERF he.GEN = "He hit himself."

Vardelm wrote:Are there any languages that use a genitive case on pronouns to indicate reflexivity, rather than having a separate set of reflexive pronouns? So, you would have something like this:

he.NOM hit.PERF he.ACC = "He hit him (someone else)."

he.NOM hit.PERF he.GEN = "He hit himself."

With reflexive possession, something a bit like this happens in Finnish:

hän romutti autonsa = 3sg trash.past3sg car.his = he trashed his (own) car.3sgposs
hän romutti hänen autonsa = 3sg.nom trash.past.3sg 3sg.gen car.poss = he trashed his car (where his refers to some other third person)

Miekko wrote:hän romutti hänen autonsa = 3sg.nom trash.past.3sg 3sg.gen car.poss = he trashed his car (where his refers to some other third person)

Do people actually use grammar like that in any part of the country? In the Finnish varieties I'm familiar with the 3rd person possessive suffix isn't used for reflexive possession. According to my instinct the comparable sentences would be

Hän romutt-i auto-nsa.
SG3 scrap-PST car-3.POSS
"He scrapped his car."

Hän romutt-i naapuri-n auto-n.
SG3 scrap-PST neighbour-GEN car-ACC
"He scrapped the neighbour's car."

Possessive suffixes aren't available for possession even in reciprocal actions,

He romutt-i-vat oma-t auto-nsa.
PL3 scrap-PST-PL3 own-PL car-3.POSS
"They scrapped their own cars."

but

He romutt-i-vat toiste-nsa auto-t.
PL3 scrap-PST-PL3 RECIP-3.POSS car-PL
"They scrapped each other's cars."

I could also mention the something about the Finnish reflexive pronoun itse. It has distant cognates with meanings "shadow" or "soul" which are likely much closer to the original meaning of the word. It's an independent word which doesn't attach to the verb but is still a nice etymology.

gach wrote:

Miekko wrote:hän romutti hänen autonsa = 3sg.nom trash.past.3sg 3sg.gen car.poss = he trashed his car (where his refers to some other third person)

Do people actually use grammar like that in any part of the country? In the Finnish varieties I'm familiar with the 3rd person possessive suffix isn't used for reflexive possession. According to my instinct the comparable sentences would be

Hän romutt-i auto-nsa.
SG3 scrap-PST car-3.POSS
"He scrapped his car."

Hän romutt-i naapuri-n auto-n.
SG3 scrap-PST neighbour-GEN car-ACC
"He scrapped the neighbour's car."

Possessive suffixes aren't available for possession even in reciprocal actions,

He romutt-i-vat oma-t auto-nsa.
PL3 scrap-PST-PL3 own-PL car-3.POSS
"They scrapped their own cars."

but

He romutt-i-vat toiste-nsa auto-t.
PL3 scrap-PST-PL3 RECIP-3.POSS car-PL
"They scrapped each other's cars."

I could also mention the something about the Finnish reflexive pronoun itse. It has distant cognates with meanings "shadow" or "soul" which are likely much closer to the original meaning of the word. It's an independent word which doesn't attach to the verb but is still a nice etymology.

Yeah, they're probably not widely applied, and it seems in non-object positions not even the standard form really does that. However, I do think autonsa would be more likely to be reflexive, and "hänen auto" more likely not to be reflexive in many colloquial forms, esp. if "hänen" is given some audible emphasis?

Miekko wrote:With reflexive possession, something a bit like this happens in Finnish:

hän romutti autonsa = 3sg trash.past3sg car.his = he trashed his (own) car.3sgposs
hän romutti hänen autonsa = 3sg.nom trash.past.3sg 3sg.gen car.poss = he trashed his car (where his refers to some other third person)

This seems different than a true reflexive, where the subject is also the object. Here, the car is the object, regardless of who it belongs to. These constructions just disambiguate between anaphoric (his own) and non-anaphoric (his = someone else's) possession.

I read on Wikipedia's reflexive pronoun page that German and Latin do something vaguely similar to "the object in genitive case = reflexive". German uses pronouns in the accusative or dative, and Latin the oblique, but it's only for 1st and 2nd person where a unique reflexive pronoun isn't really required. The 3rd person is where there would be greater need to disambiguate between he/she/it (the subject) and he/she/it (someone besides the subject).

Miekko wrote:Yeah, they're probably not widely applied, and it seems in non-object positions not even the standard form really does that. However, I do think autonsa would be more likely to be reflexive, and "hänen auto" more likely not to be reflexive in many colloquial forms, esp. if "hänen" is given some audible emphasis?

Yes, "hänen auto" is perfectly fine (if a bit odd outside a proper context) for non-reflexive possession and "autonsa" would definitely appear in the case of reflexive possession. I was wondering since your example used the possessive suffix in a sentence with two 3rd person participants while not denoting reflexive possession.

In my previous response I meant to write that the 3rd person possessive suffix isn't used for non-reflexive possession when there are more than one 3rd person participants present but somehow the non part got dropped and I didn't really think the conditions all through. That was a thought lapse from me and goes against the examples I gave. It's a typically hairy business since the possessive suffixes have reduced usage in the colloquial varieties and it might not always be clear what's the current normative standard in the literary register.

Vardelm wrote:

Miekko wrote:With reflexive possession, something a bit like this happens in Finnish:

hän romutti autonsa = 3sg trash.past3sg car.his = he trashed his (own) car.3sgposs
hän romutti hänen autonsa = 3sg.nom trash.past.3sg 3sg.gen car.poss = he trashed his car (where his refers to some other third person)

This seems different than a true reflexive, where the subject is also the object. Here, the car is the object, regardless of who it belongs to. These constructions just disambiguate between anaphoric (his own) and non-anaphoric (his = someone else's) possession.

I read on Wikipedia's reflexive pronoun page that German and Latin do something vaguely similar to "the object in genitive case = reflexive". German uses pronouns in the accusative or dative, and Latin the oblique, but it's only for 1st and 2nd person where a unique reflexive pronoun isn't really required. The 3rd person is where there would be greater need to disambiguate between he/she/it (the subject) and he/she/it (someone besides the subject).

One can imagine situations where the Finnish system would generalize, though.

Morphological marking for reflexive possession is a thing that happens and it's worth considering where it has its roots. While it's not truly reflexive (S = O) it gets close (being S = GEN). Evenki has true reflexive possessive suffixes (SG vs. PL) that get used in all persons, not just the third, whenever the S = GEN condition is fulfilled. Compare

Bi oro-r-vi etejet-che-m.
SG1 reindeer-PL-REFL.POSS guard-PRS-SG1
"I guard my reindeer."

Nungan oro-r-vi etejet-chere-n
SG3 reindeer-PL-REFL.POSS guard-PRS-SG3
"He guards his (own) reindeer"

Bi oro-r-in etejet-che-m.
SG1 reindeer-PL-SG3.POSS guard-PRS-SG1
"I guard his reindeer."

Someone who knows more about Tungusic diachronics, or other languages having similar things, might know a bit more about the history of these reflexive possession forms.

This also got me thinking, might languages with an S/O pivot have any different ways of patterning their reflexive possession?