Anaphors in contact

This paper presents a novel sketch of a research program into the morpho-syntactic/semantic characteristics of intensifiers and reflexives in a moribund Sprachinsel language, Amana German. As demonstrated in this pilot study, Amana German has (apparently) undergone a shift in the syntactic distributional properties of its intensifier and reflexive inventory. As a result, Amana German in this regard more strongly resembles Dutch and modern English rather than German. Following Gast (2006), I interpret this as a shift involving the morpho-syntactic/semantic realization of recognizing two distributional types of transitive predicates; namely, typically 'other-directed' (e.g. [+Od]) and typically 'self-directed' predicates (e.g. [?Od]).

Published online: 31 January 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.123.05put