Reflexive or Not? Choosing a Possessive in Bulgarian, Czech, and Russian

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the competition between reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns in 1PSG contexts in Bulgarian, Czech, and Russian. Using comparable web corpora, I assessed the distributional frequencies of both possessives and, drawing on the theoretical framework of corpus-based variationist linguistics, modeled linguistic factors favoring one variant. The results show that in Czech and Russian, as well as in Bulgarian short possessives, the reflexive pronoun is the default option to indicate the possessive relation with the subject. The non-reflexive is used when other possible antecedents are present in the sentence, when the possessum is animate, and when the possessive phrase is embedded and precedes the finite verb. It is argued that speakers of these Slavic languages obey the economy principle by preferring the dedicated reflexive form for expressing the reflexive meaning and resort to the non-reflexive form only when they need to avoid ambiguity, minimize processing costs, or signal additional pragmatic meanings.

KEYWORDS:

• variation
• reflexive
• possessive pronouns
• 1P
• Bulgarian
• Czech
• Russian

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In addition to the alienable/inalienable contrast, we decided to code body parts and kinship terms separately following Dahl & Koptevskaja-Tamm (2001). Although the possessor is highly predictable with both, often as the subject of the sentence, there are important differences: body parts are inanimate and syntactically anchored, whereas kinship terms are animate, egocentric, and pragmatically anchored.

2 For Russian, it is more appropriate to differentiate between three word orders (S-V-POSS, S-POSS-V, and POSS-S-V) due to a higher rate of pronominal subjects (60% of examples in the sample) and of information structure neutrality of SOV and SVO word orders. However, this is superfluous for Czech and Bulgarian since they are pro-drop languages. To ensure analysis comparability between the three languages, we opted for binary coding.

3 The degree of embedding was coded based on Timberlake’s (1980) definition: not embedded if the possessive phrase is a direct argument of the finite verb (e.g., Ja rekomenduju svoim podrugam ėti produkty. ‘I recommend my.REFL friends these products’) and embedded if it is a part of another argument (e.g. Očenʹ choču uznatʹ rodoslovnuju moej babuški ‘I want to know the lineage of my.NREFL grandmother’).

4 Examples like (13a) contain no other possible antecedents for the possessive within the sentence other than the subject. Sentences that have explicit or implied noun phrases that could be logically interpreted as an antecedent of the possessive as in object-controlled infinitives (13b) or nominalizations (13c) were coded as containing alternative antecedents.

• (13a) Ja pokazyvaju rezul'taty svoich rabot.

  ‘I show the results of my.REFL work.’

• (13b) Predlagaju Vam posmotretʹ neskolʹko moich rabot.

  ‘(I) offer you to look at some of my.NREFL works.’

• (13c) Děkuji (Vám) za brzké zodpovězení mých dotazů.

  ‘(I) thank (you) for quickly answering my.NREFL questions.’