Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

Determiners: articles and pronouns 805
5.2.1.5. Reflexive and reciprocal personal pronouns
This section will discuss the reflexive and reciprocal pronouns, which have the
characteristic property that they must be bound by (= be coreferential with) an
antecedent noun phrase in the same clause. We will first discuss the paradigm of the
reflexive pronouns, which will be followed by a discussion of the reciprocal elkaar
‘each other’. The section will be concluded with a discussion of the so-called
binding properties of these pronouns.
I. The reflexive pronouns
The form of the reflexive pronouns is determined by their antecedent: they vary
according to the person and number features involved, just like the referential
personal pronouns. They differ from the referential pronouns, however, in that they
are not marked for gender: the third person reflexive pronoun zich(zelf) is not
sensitive to the gender of the head noun of its antecedent. The Dutch reflexive
pronouns can further be divided into two morphologically distinct groups: the first
group consists of monomorphemic forms, whereas the second group consists of
bimorphemic forms that result from the addition of the bound morpheme –zelf to
the monomorphemic forms. We will refer to these two groups as the SIMPLEX and
COMPLEX REFLEXIVES, respectively. The full paradigm is given in Table 8.
Table 8: Reflexive personal pronouns
SINGULAR PLURAL
SIMPLEX COMPLEX SIMPLEX COMPLEX
FIRST PERSON me mezelf ons onszelf
SECOND REGULAR je jezelf je jezelf
PERSON POLITE u/zich uzelf/zichzelf u/zich uzelf/zichzelf
THIRD PERSON zich zichzelf zich zichzelf
The simplex reflexive pronouns of the first and second person are homophonous to
the reduced object forms of the corresponding referential pronouns, if available. The
second person plural reflexive pronoun je differs from the referential one in that the
latter must appear as the phonologically heavy form jullie. The polite reflexive form
can be either u or zich; that the latter is possible may be related to the fact that the
referential pronoun u behaves syntactically like a third person pronoun in that it
triggers third person singular agreement on the finite verb (cf. Section 5.2.1.1.1); the
fact that the referential pronoun u can be the antecedent of the reflexive zich(zelf)
shows that it also behaves like a third person singular pronoun in this respect.
Example (370) shows that the two forms u and zich are often interchangeable.
However, use of the reflexive form u is infelicitous if the subject pronoun and the
reflexive pronoun are adjacent, as in (370b&c). In imperative constructions like
(370d), on the other hand, zich is excluded. Note that this cannot fully be attributed
to the absence of the subject pronoun given that the imperative is intrinsically
second person; since zich is only used in the polite form, this should in principle
suffice to indicate that the polite form is intended.