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A new look at possessive reflexivization: A comparative study between Czech and Russian

Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2016

Abstract

The paper presents the contrastive description of reflexive possessive pronouns “svůj” in Czech and “svoj” in Russian. The research concerns syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects.

With our analysis, we shed a new light on the already investigated issue, which comes from the detailed comparison of the phenomenon of possessive reflexivization in two typologically and genetically similar languages. We show that whereas in Czech, the possessive reflexivization is mostly limited to syntactic functions and does not go beyond the grammar, in Russian it gets additional semantic meanings and moves substantially towards the lexicon.

The obtained knowledge lets us explain heretofore unclear marginal uses of reflexives in each language.