The Emergence of Reflexives and Reflexive Intensifiers in Persian: A Grammaticalization Account

The term “reflexive” has been used throughout the history of linguistics in the sense of referring to the function of marking two arguments of a verb as coreferential. In a wide variety of languages, however, including Turkic, Caucasian languages,Persian, and English(X-self),intensifiers and reflexive pronouns are completely identical in form,though not in distribution. Such wide-spread polysemy cannot be completely fortuitous. Based on diachronic studies on reflexives, body part terms, are overwhelmingly the main source of reflexives in the languages of the world. In this survey, we try to show the emergence path and the sources from which the reflexives and intensifier reflexives in Persian have developed. Based upon the extant data on reflexives and reflexive intensifiers from Old to New Persian, it is argued that a set of grammaticalization strategies, namely, metaphoric extension (in the development of body term) and layering are involved. We demonstrate that the most important sources in this historical path are possessive adjectives and adverb of emphasis.