Alternation ‘direct reflexive’ (Uncoded)

Old English did not develop a specific reflexive pronoun, in opposition to other Germanic languages. Personal pronouns, especially in the accusative, but also in the dative, were often used reflexively (Mitchell & Robinson 2012: 19). The adjective self- could be added for emphasis, but it was always morphologically independent (Van Gelderen 2002: 31). 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 a argument identifying alternation in Old English, but it can also be valency aumenting (e.g. with verbs like lifian or sittan). In direct reflexive, the participant co-referential with the subject is encoded in the accusative (except for the verb helpan) and generally behaves as a patient.