Reflexive deletion allowed?

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Friedel Martin Frowein - 05 Mar 2005 12:32 GMT

Hi there!

I am writing term paper on resultative constructions in English and
German and stumbled across the problem of reflexive insertion in certain
constructions of both languages, e.g.

intransitive / agentive
-----------------------
a.    The joggers ran themselves sick.
b.    The kids laughed themselves into a frenzy.
c.    The teacher talked himself blue in the face.
d.    The tourists walked themselves ragged.

transitive / agentive
---------------------
e.    He drank himself into the grave.
f.    The tenors sang themselves hoarse.

As far as I know all these sentences are judged grammatical by native
speakers (if not please let me know!). How would, in your own opinion,
grammaticality change if the reflexives (himself, themselves) are left
out in the constructions above?

It would be great if you could give your grammaticality judgements in
the following way:

*     = ungrammatical
??     = very strange but not yet ungrammatical
?     = a little strange but not yet ungrammatical
ok     = perfect sentence

e.g. a=?, b=*, c=ok etc.
(you are of course also invited to comment in detail)

BTW, I'm also looking for constructions with verbs which are both
intransitive (i.e. it does not take a direct object) and non-agentive
(i.e. the verb's subject does not consciously and willingly do
something). Do you have any ideas?

Thanks, I really appreciate your support!
Friedel

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CyberCypher - 05 Mar 2005 19:02 GMT

Friedel Martin Frowein wrote on 05 Mar 2005:

> Hi there!
>
[quoted text clipped - 16 lines]
> As far as I know all these sentences are judged grammatical by
> native speakers (if not please let me know!).

Yes, they're perfectly grammatical and idiomatic.

> How would, in your
> own opinion, grammaticality change if the reflexives (himself,
> themselves) are left out in the constructions above?

Not only would the grammar change (not necessarily to
ungrammaticality), but so would the meanings. For example, "The
tenors sang hoarse" would mean that they were hoarse before they
began to sing, not after. "He drank into the grave" is meaningless
nonsense, and "The kids laughed into a frenzy" is perfectly
grammatical, but because a "frenzy" is a state of being and not
tangible and has no 3rd dimension into which one can laugh, it is a
nonsensical sentence.

> It would be great if you could give your grammaticality judgements
> in the following way:
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
> Thanks, I really appreciate your support!
> Friedel

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Friedel Martin Frowein - 06 Mar 2005 16:25 GMT

Thanks, that helped a lot!

I'm now trying to find constructions similar to the one in (a) below
where the reflexive is (at least syntactically) optional. The results
are (b) in (c) although I am not too sure whether or not these sentences
are grammatical without the reflexives.

a.    The tenors sang (themselves) hoarse.
b.    The skydiver jumped (himself) injured.
c.    The student read (himself) tired.

Would you please also comment on these two? As a non-native speaker I
always have the problem that the more often I hear such sentences, the
more I like them (even though they might be totally wrong 8))

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einde. ocallaghan - 06 Mar 2005 19:56 GMT

> Thanks, that helped a lot!
>
[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
> always have the problem that the more often I hear such sentences, the
> more I like them (even though they might be totally wrong 8))

Neither b. nor c. make sense in either case (i.e. with the reflexive or
without).

Regards, Einde O'Callaghan

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CyberCypher - 07 Mar 2005 01:11 GMT

Friedel Martin Frowein wrote on 07 Mar 2005:

> Thanks, that helped a lot!
>
> I'm now trying to find constructions similar to the one in (a)
> below where the reflexive is (at least syntactically) optional.

I don't think this is an example of a syntactic option. That would be
something like this:

"He said (that) he was hungry."

Including the "that" is syntactically optionaland semantically
neutral (ie it doesn't change the meaning).

> The results are (b) in (c) although I am not too sure whether or
> not these sentences are grammatical without the reflexives.
>
> a. The tenors sang (themselves) hoarse.

As I said in my previous reply, the sentences represented here have
two different meanings. With the reflexive it means that the singers
started out in good voice but ended up hoarse because of their
singing. Without the reflexive it means that the singers were hoarse
when they began singing, perhaps because they had been shouting at a
sporting event or because they all had throat infections. That
doesn't allow a choice as the "that" example above does.

> b. The skydiver jumped (himself) injured.
> c. The student read (himself) tired.

As Einde pointed out in his reply, neither of these is a sensible
sentence with the reflexive. I think, however, one could make a case
for calling both elliptical because an important (for the written
language and for formal speech) adverbial has been dropped: "while".

I don't think a native speaker of English would have any trouble
understanding what these sentences meant if someone actually used
them in speech or writing, but they are not idiomatic to my eye or my
ear. They look and sound more like the kind of thing some linguists
(including native anglophones(,) who ought to know better) will claim
is "possible in English".

These constructions are "possible in English" only becase they
represent a certain structure that is both grammatical and idiomatic
when the words that fill the slots are semantically appropriate. They
are formulaic and read as if a computer program had created them. I
used to have hundreds of examples of such silliness from the archives
of Japanese publishers of EFL books.

While authentic speech is filled with exceptional sentences in
exceptional circumstances, the purpose of using example sentences
like these ought to be to illustrate standard idiomatic expression,
not grammatically possible but non-idiomatic or semantically absurd
expression.

> Would you please also comment on these two? As a non-native
> speaker I always have the problem that the more often I hear such
> sentences, the more I like them (even though they might be totally
> wrong 8))

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Friedel Martin Frowein - 12 Mar 2005 08:17 GMT

Thank you very much for you replies. That helped a lot ;-)

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Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / March 2005

Reflexive deletion allowed?