Arguments 255

the gender--number of its antecedent (for example, plural in [299] above, singular in [335] below). Cƒv may or may not agree in case with ct,z´. When it agrees in case, cƒv registers surprise that it is specifically this entity that is involved in the event as opposed to other entities that might be imagined. In [335], cƒv implies a set of people who might be deceived, but it turns out that the individual who is the same as the subject does not belong to that set.

[335]<ehtyrjdf jy vju j,vfyenm, yj yt vju j,vfyenm cfvjuj ct,z. Burenkov he could deceive, but he could not deceive himself.

Often cƒv does not agree with ct,z´ in case, and instead appears in the nominative case, even though it is still positioned next to the reflexive, cƒv ct,z´, or immediately in front of a preposition, cƒv c cj,j´q ‘with himself’, cƒv gj ct,t ‘by itself’, cƒv pf ct,z´ ‘for himself’. When cƒv remains in the nominative, it contrasts the surprising fact that the event occurred at all with the possibility that it might not have occurred. In [336], the surprise is that the change in the individual has occurred at all, when one might expect no change.

[336]Pf jlye ytltk/ cfv yf ct,z cnfk ytgj[j;.

Over the course of a week he became unlike himself.

The difference, then, is that cfvjuj´ ct,z´ creates a contrast based on the individual -- it is noteworthy that Self is affected, when other individuals are not. Cƒv ct,z´, with nominative, creates a contrast based on the polarity of the event: it is surprising the event occurred at all, when it might not have.

4.7.12 Retrospective on reflexives

Reflexive pronouns are one of the devices that Russian (and many other languages) use to keep track of an individual. On most domains, choosing between a reflexive and non-reflexive seems automatic, inasmuch as the distribution follows the principle of complementary reference: a reflexive pronoun points to the same individual that is the subject (or, rarely, with special predicates, some other argument), while a non-reflexive indicates an individual distinct from the subject. But there are also contexts in which complementarity of reference is not entirely strict. Complementarity breaks down when the domain containing the pronoun site and antecedent is not cohesive, or when the antecedent is less than a full-fledged subject (passive agents, implicit subjects of infinitives). Moreover, firstor second-person antecedents do not obey the constraint of complementarity of reference with respect to possessive adjectives. In contexts in which both reflexive and non-reflexive pronouns can refer to the same individual, a non-reflexive pronoun indicates that the entity is defined independently. A reflexive pronoun insists that the reference of that entity is to be defined within