Beschreibung:
All major Germanic languages except Yiddish have intensifiers that have developed from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic form *selba-. For example, in English we have "herself," in Icelandic there is "sjalfur "and in Gothic - "silba."This book deals with the question of why intensifiers and reflexives are formally indistinguishable in so many languages of the world. Using evidence from germanic languages, this is a semasiological study on the family of self-forms in Germanic languages.
1. Introduction 2. The Distribution and Morphology of Head-Adjacent Self 3. Head-Adjacent Intensifiers as Expressions of an Identity Function 4. The Syntax of Head-Distant Intensifiers 5. Combinatorial Properties of Head-Distant Intensifiers 6. The Interpretation of Head-Distant Intensifiers 7. Reflexivity and the Identity Function 8. The Grammar of Reflexivity in Germanic Languages