Reflexive alert
G.M. Filisko
writes
in the
ABA Journal eReport
for 5/19/06, about speculations as to why J. Michael Luttig is
resigning as a U.S. Circuit Court judge. The fifth paragraph
begins:
Others have speculated Luttig resigned
in anger at the Bush administration over its handling of the Jose
Padilla case, in disappointment caused by dimming hopes for a Supreme
Court seat, or in the expectation that a private sector job will better
position himself for the next
Supreme Court vacancy.
I've bolded a startling reflexive pronoun. The advice books don't
warn you against such reflexives; they spend a lot of time inveighing
against
myself (and sometimes
yourself) without an overt
antecedent (as in "You should give it to Sandy and myself"), but the
problem here is not that an antecedent is lacking for "himself" --
"Luttig" is the subject of a clause that begins "Luttig resigned" and
takes up the rest of the sentence -- but that "Luttig" is structurally
too distant from the reflexive to count as an antecedent for it.
English speakers and writers rarely produce such reflexives, so
examples like the Luttig sentence might easily escape the notice of the
grammar and usage mavens. Even if they did collect such examples,
they'd probably be at a loss to say why reflexives (rather than plain
personal pronouns) are odd in them.
In English. Similar examples in Japanese, with the all-purpose
Japanese reflexive
zibun, are
fine. What's going on? And why is (2) so much worse than
(1), even granting that (1) isn't stellar?
(1) Luttig expects that a private
sector job will better position himself for a Supreme Court vacancy.
(2) I'm speculating about Luttig that a private sector job will
better position himself for a Supreme Court vacancy.
[Original example from Victor Steinbok, who got it from Ann Althouse.]
First, a little background about English reflexives. (Seasoned
syntacticians can skip this part.) The big generalization
(subject to some provisos) here is that in English reflexives and their
antecedents must belong to the same clause, in a special sense of
"belong":
Definition: An occurrence X of some
expression within a sentence Y belongs
to the smallest clause within Y that contains X.
Clause-Mate Condition: Reflexive pronouns and their antecedents must
belong to the same clause.
Look at (1), a pared-down version of the original Luttig
sentence. The clause that the reflexive pronoun "himself" belongs
to is "(that) a private sector job will better position himself for a
Supreme Court vacancy", and this clause does not contain the (intended)
antecedent for "himself", namely "Luttig"; instead, "Luttig" belongs to
the (larger) clause that comprises all of sentence (1). Similarly
for (2). Neither (1) nor (2) satisfies the Clause-Mate Condition,
so both should be ungrammatical, and equally so.
When I first looked at the Luttig sentence, I thought that Filisko
chose a reflexive pronoun for its emphatic or intensifying effect (one
of the motives for antecedentless
myself
and
yourself).
Reflexives are good for this because they are weightier than accusative
personal pronouns: they have two syllables rather than one, and always
bear some accent, while accusative pronouns are usually
unaccented. And maybe that's all there is to say about the matter.
But then I noticed that the clause that the reflexive belongs to is the
complement of an deverbal noun denoting a thought, "expectation", and
specifically
LUTTIG'S thought; Filisko could have
written "in his expectation that...", but the identity of the expecter
is perfectly clear for the version "in the expectation that..."
Then the light came on and the word
logophoric
popped up in my head.
Logophoric pronouns are used in complements of verbs of saying or
thinking to refer to the person responsible for the words or thoughts.
(For some general discussion, see Peter Sells's influential "Aspects of
Logophoricity" in
Linguistic Inquiry,
1987.) Reflexive pronouns in some languages have logophoric uses,
probably on the grounds that the speaker or writer is taking the
viewpoint of the person whose speech or thought is being
represented. The Japanese all-purpose reflexive
zibun has logophoric uses; the
literature on
zibun is now
enormous, but for a recent survey of some relevant facts, see Yukio
Hiroshe's
article
"Viewpoint and the nature of the Japanese reflexive
zibun" (Cognitive Linguistics, 2002).
In any case, "himself" in (1), and in the original Luttig sentence, is
in the right place for a logophorically used reflexive, while the
reflexive in (2) is not -- which might explain why (2) is so much worse
than (1).
It turns out that I am not the first person to suggest that English, or
at least some varieties of English, might have logophoric uses of its
reflexive pronouns. The most useful discussion I've been able to
unearth (in an admittedly quick search) is in
a
handout for a talk ("The interpretation of logophoric
self-forms, and some consequences
for a model of reference and denotation") given by Volker Gast at the
5th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium in
2004. (There is also a fair amount of literature on logophoric
and other non-clause-mate reflexives in earlier stages of English,
where they were apparently more frequent than they are now.) It's
a handout, but a very detailed one, with a fair number of attested
examples and some bibliography.
In fact, I am not the first person to discuss, right here in the halls
of Language Log Plaza, what might be logophoric uses of English
reflexive pronouns. Back in January,
a
guest posting by Chris Culy (no slouch on logophoricity), "Getting
ourselves in trouble", started from the Darrel Waltrip quote
He told me I talked and talked and
talked, and eventually I'd say something that would get myself in
trouble.
(which has the right context for a logophoric reflexive) and went
on to explore some other non-clause-mate reflexives in English that are
pretty clearly not logophoric -- all this in response to Geoff Pullum's
straightforward
deploring of George W. Bush's "ourselves" in
And so long as the war on terror goes
on, and so long as there's a threat, we will inevitably need to hold
people that would do ourselves harm.
(which is certainly not logophoric, but is 1st person, so might fall
into another category of non-clause-mate reflexives).
So it might be that the original Luttig sentence comes from a variety
of English -- one that is not mine, or Steinbok's, or, I would imagine,
Pullum's -- where logophoric reflexives are possible. There's a
lot of variation in language, after all, and so far I know, no one has
ever claimed that logophoric reflexives are impossible in English on
some principled grounds, which means that finding varieties that have
them should be cause for a small celebration: here's something that
languages can do, and, by golly, here are varieties of English (who
knew?) that do it.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at June 2, 2006 05:58 PM