Reflexive Pronouns: A Theoretical and Experimental Synthesis

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

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2. A Beginning Synthesis

   • Darcy Sperlich

   Pages 1-20

3. A Theoretical Synthesis

   • Darcy Sperlich

   Pages 21-95

4. An Experimental Synthesis

   • Darcy Sperlich

   Pages 97-172

5. A Final Synthesis

   • Darcy Sperlich

   Pages 173-190

6. Back Matter

   Pages 191-235

   PDF

This book presents a comprehensive picture of reflexive pronouns from both a theoretical and experimental perspective, using the well-researched languages of English, German, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In order to understand the data from varying theoretical perspectives, the book considers selected syntactic and pragmatic analyses based on their current importance in the field. The volume consequently introduces the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach, which is a novel theoretical synthesis incorporating a sentence and pragmatic processor that accounts for reflexive pronoun behaviour in these six languages. Moreover, in support of this model a vast array of experimental literature is considered, including first and second language acquisition, bilingual, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and clinical studies. It is through both the intuitive and experimental data linguistic theorizing relies upon that brings out the strengths of the modelling adopted here, paving new avenues for future research. In sum, this volume unites a diverse array of the literature that currently sits largely divorced between the theoretical and experimental realms, and when put together a better understanding of reflexive pronouns under the auspices of the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach is forged.

• Theoretical Approaches to Reflexive Pronouns
• Second Language Acquisition Studies
• Child studies
• Clinical studies
• Data and theory synthesis

“This book is an impressive undertaking in its breadth, depth, and insight that readers will look to as a state-of-the-art source on the synthesis of theoretical and empirical studies of reflexive pronouns. … As researchers, we find this book most up-to-date, well-organized, thought-provoking, and extremely useful to serve as a theoretical framework for empirical studies in areas of language acquisition … . we would like to highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the relevant research mentioned above.” (Li Zeng, Hao Lin and Xinmin Zheng, Frontiers in Psychology, frontiersin.org, March 24, 2021)

• Department of English, National Central University, Taoyuan City, Taiwan

  Darcy Sperlich

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