This paper proposes that reflexivity of natural reflexives is encoded through a reflexivizing head, Refl(exive), and that the variation of natural reflexives across languages is ascribed to different selectional properties of Refl. Specifically, it is proposed that Refl comes in two variants, verb-selecting Refl and Voice-selecting Refl, and that languages differ as to which variant of Refl they employ to derive the natural reflexive. It is shown that the different behaviors of the natural reflexive in English- and French-type languages with respect to the productivity as well as the possibilities of ECM reflexivization, dative reflexivization, reflexive nominalization, and proxy interpretation can be successfully accounted for under the proposed approach. The paper offers an account of the crosslinguistic variation of the reflexive in purely syntactic terms, showing that grammar can be modeled to have a single generative component, i.e., the syntax, concerning reflexivization.
1. Introduction
2. Proposal
3. The Crosslinguistic Variation
4. Conclusion
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