Tell me about yourself

This paper offers an innovative Columbia School account of English -self pronouns (myself, yourself, etc.). The analysis rejects the view that the distribution of -self pronouns is a reflex of syntactic structure, as well as the traditional characterization of -self as a reflexive pronoun. Instead, -self forms are hypothesized to signal a constant meaning, insistence on a referent, which accounts for the forms’ distribution in authentic texts. This approach has led to the discovery that -self forms contribute to the same types of interpretations across a wide range of different structural contexts, including not only reflexive and emphatic uses, but also like-phrases, picture noun phrases, logophoric uses, conjoined expressions, and other environments.