Me, Myself, and I: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Unbound Reflexive Pronouns in English

This dissertation investigates the social meaning potential of unbound reflexives and how its social meanings are connected to structural properties of the reflexive, associations with particular speech styles, and iconic interpretations of the reflexive's form. "Myself" and "yourself" — the reflexive variant of first and second person singular pronouns — often emerge as socially and prescriptively marked in sentences like, "Amber and myself will need to take a raincheck". In syntactic contexts like coordination, the reflexive variant is not required and can alternate with either the nominative "I" or accusative "me". While optional uses of reflexives have been shown to have pragmatic functions of logophoricity and emphasis (Kuno 1987; Zribi-Hertz 1989; a.o.), I argue for a distinct and additional way that optional reflexives can be leveraged socially.

In examining their indexical potential across a range of contexts, I show that unbound reflexive pronouns are associated with formality and its related stances of politeness, indirectness, and emotional distance. More specifically, they are prominently associated with a professional workplace style of speech and related meanings such as legitimacy, credibility, competence, and seriousness. I also offer an analysis of how its morphological structure of possession ["my" + "self"] makes the reflexive form an effective semiotic resource for conveying indirectness: it refers to the speaker as "the self which belongs to the speaker''. Languages users themselves also rationalize the feature's link to indirectness and other social qualities by invoking narratives of iconicity in metalinguistic commentary. For example, non-reflexives like "me"/"I"/"you" are described as plain and direct due to their short length. Reflexives are described as excessive and indirect as a result of their comparatively longer length.

Given the scarcity of third-wave approaches to morpho-syntatic variation, this dissertation explores how speakers deploy the unbound reflexive as a stylistic resource whose social meaning emerges in local contexts and ideologically negotiated (Eckert 2012). I conduct a mixed-methods analysis of three primary data sources: public discourse about the feature as it emerges in Internet metalinguistic commentary, a matched-guise perception experiment comparing perceptions of "me", "myself", and "I", and a selection of naturally occurring language production in television media. This case study of a morpho-syntactic feature expands the small but growing body of work theorizing how non-phonological variation operates (Lavandera 1978; Moore 2021; Eckert 2019). Previous first-wave research on unbound reflexives shows that this feature does not correlate with demographic features (Angermeyer & Singler 2002; Maddeaux 2014; Paterson 2018), which aligns with the findings of the present dissertation. As a feature without strong demographic correlates, the unbound reflexive's social meaning does not have its roots in an n-th order association (Silverstein 2003) or as an indicator (Labov 1972). The macro-social is still highly relevant, which I demonstrate in my analysis of how prescriptivism, standard language ideology, and class-based ideologies about hypercorrection affect the evaluation of a feature that is widely considered to be prescriptively incorrect, yet is associated with formality.