Three types of reflexive verbs in German

Abstract

Some recent studies on reflexive constructions have claimed that the socalled weak reflexive always blocks the appearance of the external argument. According to this analysis, the subject of the reflexive predicates corresponds to the internal argument. I argue against this view and show that the subject of reflexive sentences in German corresponds to either the external or internal argument, as Reinhart and Siloni (Linguistic Inquiry 36: 389–436, 2005) claim. However, as opposed to them, I argue that the reflexive with grooming verbs in German bears a thematic role, just as the reflexive with transitive verbs. Consequently reflexive verbs in German are classified into the following three types with respect to argument structure: (i) verbs that have both an external argument and an internal argument; (ii) verbs that have an external argument only; (iii) verbs that have an internal argument only. It is also shown that this classification captures the distribution of reflexives both in English and Dutch.