CONTRAST, DISCOURSE PROMINENCE, AND INTENSIFICATION, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO LOCALLY FREE REFLEXIVES IN BRITISH ENGLISH

Locally free reflexives in British English are best analyzed as intens ified nonnominative pronouns, subject to two conditions that regulate English intensive NPs generally: (a) a contrastiveness requirement and (b) a requirement that the character being referred to be more import ant or more central than other characters included in the contrast set . The latter 'discourse prominence' requirement is similar to the one that regulates proximate marking in the Algonquian languages. The exte nt to which discourse prominence marking can mimic locality marking ma y explain historical conversions of intensives to anaphors, as well as certain anomalies in child language. This frequent formal overlapping makes it necessary to take marking for discourse prominence into acco unt whenever locality-marking is under investigation.