Where himself comes from

Abstract

One of the main differences between English and the other Germanic languages concerns the reflexive system and intensifiers. Unlike the other Germanic languages, English has only one form for both the reflexive anaphor and the intensifier, namely himself (the masculine form of the 3rd person singular stands for the entire paradigm of English reflexive anaphors). The syntactic and semantic properties of himself are neither traceable back to the Old English pronominal system nor to the Old English intensifier, but establish themselves in Late Middle English and continue to develop throughout Early Modern English. My paper tries to account for such a peculiarity of English and the characteristics of himself in terms of grammaticalization processes. It is contended that the reflexive anaphor himself developed first as a disambiguating device in contexts where the Old English simple pronoun would be understood as a marker of disjoint reference (prototypical transitive predicates), and that later it was grammaticalized into a coreference marker, similarly to what happens in Creoles.