Abstract
ABSTRACT This article investigates the competition between reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns in 1PSG contexts in Bulgarian, Czech, and Russian. Using comparable web corpora, I assessed the distributional frequencies of both possessives and, drawing on the theoretical framework of corpus-based variationist linguistics, modeled linguistic factors favoring one variant. The results show that in Czech and Russian, as well as in Bulgarian short possessives, the reflexive pronoun is the default option to indicate the possessive relation with the subject. The non-reflexive is used when other possible antecedents are present in the sentence, when the possessum is animate, and when the possessive phrase is embedded and precedes the finite verb. It is argued that speakers of these Slavic languages obey the economy principle by preferring the dedicated reflexive form for expressing the reflexive meaning and resort to the non-reflexive form only when they need to avoid ambiguity, minimize processing costs, or signal additional pragmatic meanings.
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