Alternation ‘indirect reflexive’ (Uncoded)

Actual reflexive pronouns are still absent in Middle English, and personal pronouns, in the non-nominative case, were used reflexively. Although in Old and Middle English the pronoun self was used for emphasis after personal pronouns, in later Middle English it began to gradually merge into compounds (Wełna 2017: 59). As Sinar (2006) has shown, the grammaticalization of reflexive pronouns can only be dated to Early Modern English. Despite being “participant-merging” from a semantic point of view, syntactically the reflexive can hardly be considered as a valency decreasing mechanism. In most of the cases, it is an argument identifying alternation in Middle English, but it can also be valency aumenting. In indirect reflexive, the participant co-referential with the subject is encoded in the prepositionless non-nominative case or in a PP and generally behaves either as a recipient or as a beneficiary.