Reflexives and the Dependency Relation “R”

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a complete syntactic analysis of the reflexives of English. Most of the work in this area, particularly work in the Government-Binding theory, has focused on one type of reflexive, what has come to be called the “anaphor” reflexive. Thus Koster (1984), in describing reflexives (among other things), postulates a number of essential properties characteristic of a core dependency relation between constituents. This relation, labelled “R”, is illustrated in (1). Its properties are listed in (2).