Reflexive Voice

The problem of the Reflexive voice arises when we deal with such language units as “a verb + a reflexive pronoun”.

e.g. He hurt himself; she found herself in the yard; they dressed themselves.

Some authors say that in such cases we deal with a special reflexive voice-form in which the reflexive pronoun is treated as an auxiliary element. It means that they take similar units for analytical forms. Other scholars speak of free word-combinations in such cases. They say that the units under consideration consist of a verb in the active voice and an object to it, expressed by a reflexive pronoun.

At present the 2^nd opinion seems to be more convincing and some arguments can be given in its favour:

1) The reflexive pronoun denotes an object at which the action named by the verb is directed. In such phrases the reflexive pronoun can be replaced by some other word denoting an object or the verb can take two or more homogeneous objects, that is a reflexive pronoun and some other nouns or pronouns. The syntactic relations between the verb and the reflexive pronoun are similar to those between the verb and the other homogeneous object. So if we consider that there are syntactic relations between the verb and the reflexive pronoun then it is not an analytical voice-form, but a free word-combination.

e.g. He hurt himself or he hurt his finger, or he hurt him and himself, he hurt himself and his friend, he dressed himself and his younger brother.

2) The reflexive pronoun can take its own appositive attribute and it means that it can have independent of the head word syntactic relations, what is foreign to analytical forms, because the latter are treated as one unit.

Hence, the reflexive pronoun getting into syntactic relations of its own can’t be an auxiliary element. It is a self-dependent member of the sentence, that is an object.

e.g. He was defending himself, a victim of the plot. (an apposition to “himself”).

3) The meaning of the verb in most cases is not changed when we add a reflexive pronoun or drop it. The reflexive pronoun fills in the position of an object opened by the verb due to its transitive nature and syntactic valiancy [ei] in the process of producing a sentence. Not to fill it in can make the verb phrase or the sentence grammatically incomplete or deficient.

e.g. He hurt … (grammatically incomplete).

Moreover, sometimes when the subject and the object of the predicate verb denote the same agent, the reflexive pronoun can be easily omitted when the verb is used intransitively and that is foreign to auxiliaries in analytical verb-forms.

He dressed himself = he dressed;

He washed himself = he washed.

The omitted reflexive pronoun can be easily restored and should be restored when the verb takes two or more homogeneous objects.

e.g. He dressed and his younger brother – wrong.

He dressed himself and his younger brother – right

4) The reflexive pronoun has independent of the predicate verb syntactic relations with the subject, because it agrees with it in gender, number and person and that is foreign to analytical forms.

He dressed himself. They dressed themselves.

The reflexive pronoun is in secondary appositive relations with the subject and it can easily be separated from the verb to modify the subject when it becomes rhematic or the communicative centre of the utterance and that is impossible for analytical forms.

e.g. He hurt himself. It was he himself who was hurt.

However, those who recognize the existence of the Reflexive voice say that there are such verb-phrases with a reflexive pronoun which deny all or nearly all the arguments given above. They mean such phrases as: to find oneself, to pride oneself, to behave oneself.

We can’t say “he found himself and all the others in the yard”. The matter is that in such phrases the reflexive pronoun happens to change the meaning of the verb.

e.g. He found the book. He found himself in the street.

He behaved outrageously (вызывающе).

He behaved himself (должным образом).

To choose any point of view remains with the scholar. Nevertheless, it seems more reasonable to agree that in English there is no special reflexive voice. Mostly we deal with a free word combination, consisting of a verb in the Active Voice and a reflexive pronoun as an object to it. But there is a group of reflexive verbs which make up a lexico-semantic group. These verbs establish phraseological units with reflexive pronouns similar to bound phrases like: give up, look after, look for.