Her, Hers, Herself and Her Own: Deriving Reflexive Possessive Pronouns in English
Chigchi Bai
March 2024 

Taking ‘her’, ‘hers’, ‘herself’ and ‘her own’ as an example, this short article analyzes the internal syntactic structure of English personal pronouns in connection with their morphological properties within the framework of Distributed Morphology. The core proposal is that ‘her own’ is a reflexive possessive complex pronoun that is functionally equivalent to the unlexicalized form ‘herself’s’. The supporting arguments are as follows. First, empirically, the purported “lexical reflexive” use of ‘her’ leaves unexplained the syntactic and morphological peculiarity of ‘her’ and the form-meaning mismatch triggered by the morphological poverty of it as a reflexive indexical. Second, theoretically, the morphological compactness of English pronouns and their syntactic functions blur head-phrase distinction. Third, theoretically again, pronouns are syntactically distributed on multiple nodes in their derivation but morphologically clustered as words, with phi-features, the reflexive feature and the possessive feature entering into the derivation separately but united later on before vocabulary insertion.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007975 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	pronoun, anaphor, reflexive, possessive, syntax, morphology, distributed morphology, english, chinese, japanese, mongolian, semantics, morphology, syntax
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